Chapter 110 Hand-made Dumplings
Although the weather has cleared up, looking into the distance, everything is still a vast expanse of white, giving me the illusion that it is still snowing.
In cold weather, you should eat something hot. I've been craving spicy hot pot lately. I haven't had it since I finished all the meatballs I had stocked up on.
With nothing else to do, I'm going to make a batch of meatballs to stock up and eat slowly.
I had some sweet millet porridge early in the morning and quickly finished my breakfast. I then found a large piece of beef, a pheasant, a fish, and a piece of lean pork in the refrigerator and left them outside to thaw.
I researched the ingredients needed in the recipe, and found all the ones I had at home and prepared them in advance.
Soak some wild mushrooms, chop dried cilantro, mince a few cloves of garlic, and fry them in oil to make crispy garlic.
Once the meat has mostly melted, you can start cooking.
Add water to the large iron pot and simmer it over a low flame.
First, make shiitake mushroom and chicken meatballs. Rinse the soaked wild mushrooms several times with water, tear them into small pieces, and chop them into mushroom pieces.
Remove the skin and bones from the pheasant meat, removing as much meat as possible. Wrap the bones and skin in plastic wrap and store them in the back room for later use in making soup.
The remaining pheasant meat was ground into a paste in a meat grinder and then put into a large bowl.
Add appropriate amounts of salt, sugar, MSG, baking soda, white pepper powder, and plenty of sweet potato starch to a large bowl.
Add an appropriate amount of ice water and stir and pat the meat in one direction to make it more elastic, resulting in more chewy and bouncy meatballs.
Once the chicken has been mashed into a sticky paste, add the chopped shiitake mushrooms and continue mashing until it becomes even stickier. Then it's ready to be cooked.
Grab a little minced meat in your hand, squeeze out a meatball from between your thumb and forefinger, and quickly drop it into the pot.
The water in the pot was hot, but not boiling, which perfectly held the shape of the chicken meatballs in place.
At first, it was a bit difficult to control the size of the chicken meatballs, but after making a few more, I gradually became more skilled and faster.
A small bowl of minced chicken was used to cover a layer of chicken meatballs. More firewood was added to the stove to cook the chicken meatballs.
After the water boils, skim off the foam with a spoon. Once the meatballs are cooked through and firm, use a slotted spoon to scoop them out and place them in a large bowl to cool.
Next, make beef balls. Cut the beef into small pieces and put them into a meat grinder to grind into a paste.
After placing them in a bowl, add the same seasonings as for the chicken meatballs, but replace the chopped shiitake mushrooms with fried garlic. The shiitake mushrooms will mask the aroma of the beef, while the fried garlic will make the beef meatballs more fragrant.
Once the beef balls have been stirred until they become sticky, the water temperature in the pot has dropped a bit, making it the perfect time to cook the balls.
Following the same method, cook the beef balls one by one into the pot, skimming off any foam. Once cooked, remove them and let them cool.
Next, make coriander balls. Grind the pork into a paste, crush the dried coriander in your hand into small pieces, and sprinkle them into the meat paste.
Add the same seasonings as for beef and chicken meatballs, stir until well combined, shape into balls, and cook in a pot until done.
Logically, the seasonings for the various meatballs made by the vendors should be different, and the seasonings mentioned in the tutorial books should also be different, but these are all the ones I have, so I just used the same ones for all of them.
Finally, I made fish tofu. The fish I used was a variety that I often eat, and apart from one large bone in the middle, it had almost no small bones.
Remove the large bones, cut off the head and fins, and shave off the skin; what's left is pure fish meat.
Cut the fish into small pieces, put them in a meat grinder along with ice water, and grind them into a paste.
Add salt, sugar, MSG, white pepper powder, tapioca starch, and two egg whites to the minced meat.
Stir for a while until the meat paste becomes sticky, then pour it all into a deep stainless steel tray. Use a spatula dipped in a little water to smooth the surface of the meat paste, turning it into a flat cuboid. Two trays were used in total.
Add firewood to the stove, place a steamer rack in the pot, and put the tray containing the minced meat in the pot to steam.
It takes a while to steam, about half an hour.
While steaming the fish paste, they cleaned up the mess.
After washing the cutting board, meat grinder, and other used pots and pans, and wiping the cutting board and stove clean, I sat down to rest for a while. The fish paste was ready.
Opening the pot lid reveals a unique aroma reminiscent of fish balls.
When you turn the tray upside down, it's a large, flat, rectangular block that feels bouncy and fun to press.
It's quite amazing; I never expected that the soft, mushy minced meat would become so firm after steaming for a while.
Cut the two large pieces of meat into small cubes. Take a small portion and keep it to eat as fish balls, and use the rest to make fish tofu.
Pour oil into a frying pan and wait for it to heat up. Then, arrange a neat layer of small cubes on top of the oil.
Fry each side until golden brown and slightly shrunken, then the fish tofu is ready.
It took four batches to fry all the fish tofu.
Fish tofu, cilantro balls, beef balls, and shiitake mushroom and chicken balls—the total amount makes up a huge bowl.
The beef balls are the most bouncy and chewy, with a little bit of oil seeping out from the small hole in the middle. The more you chew, the more fragrant they become, with a strong beef flavor.
The mushroom and chicken meatballs are slightly soft, and you can bite into the granular mushroom pieces. The flavors of chicken and mushrooms are intertwined, much like the mushroom meatballs I used to eat.
The fish tofu tastes better than the kind we ate before the apocalypse. The outside is fragrant from being deep-fried, and the inside is tender and delicious.
The cilantro meatballs taste similar to the mushroom and chicken meatballs, but without the grainy texture of mushrooms. The whole meatball is filled with the flavor of cilantro. I love cilantro, so I especially love the taste of these meatballs.
Several dogs sat on the ground staring intently at me, drooling in four small puddles.
Two meatballs were thrown into the mouths of the dogs. Little Melon, Little Three, and Little Four didn't seem to chew them at all, they just gulped them down. Little Di was more refined, catching the meatballs and slowly spitting them out on the ground, chewing them bit by bit. It was a sight to behold.
The batch of meatballs was a great success. I packed them into different plastic bags according to their categories, squeezed out the air, and stored them in wooden boxes in the back room.
I kept a few of each, eager to make a delicious mala tang (spicy hot pot).
The broth in the pot where the meatballs were cooking had turned white and was full of meaty flavor. It looked a bit dirty to me, but it was a delicacy to the dog.
Pour all the soup into a bowl; I'll save it for the dog to eat with rice porridge for the next two days.
While the soup was still warm, I took out a few steamed buns from the refrigerator, broke them into small pieces, soaked them in the soup, and placed them directly in the dog's bowl.
The dogs, who weren't satisfied with just two meatballs, finally ate until they were stuffed with meat broth.
After the dogs had eaten their fill, they started preparing to make the spicy hot pot.
Pour oil into a pot, heat the oil, add chopped green onions, minced garlic, and cilantro and fry until fragrant. Remove the solids when they turn brown.
Put sesame seeds, chili flakes, and a small amount of Sichuan peppercorn powder in a bowl, then pour the hot oil from the pan into the bowl.
With a sizzling sound, the chili flakes tumbled in the bowl, releasing a unique aroma. Stir it well with chopsticks, and you have a fragrant secret-recipe chili oil.
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