Half an hour later, Shengnan and Yang Wanlin came back with happy faces. As expected, Shengnan was pregnant and had been pregnant for almost six weeks. Yang Wanlin was smiling with joy. Shengnan was also very excited and couldn't wait to go to the tofu shop to tell Liu Xiu the good news. Later, she was stopped by Liu's mother and Wang Shuihua, who asked her to wait until the evening to tell Liu Xiu because there were outsiders in the tofu shop and to wait three months before telling outsiders.
Xuemei also noticed that Han Chen glanced at her when he heard the news that Shengnan was pregnant.
After Shengnan finished sharing the good news, everyone dispersed and returned to their homes. Once home, the family got busy. Liu's father, mother, and Han Chen began mixing mud to build mud walls. Liu's father built a shed to store the dried mud bricks. They already had enough to build a kitchen and a firewood shed. They'd get some more during this time, and after the summer harvest, when they were less busy, they could start building the necessary rooms in Xuemei and Han Chen's brick house.
Qingya took the two brothers Ruirui and Feifei to the mountains to collect firewood, and also got some seasonal mountain products to eat.
Xuemei was at home making chili sauce with snails to send to the Lin family. Lin Hongzhi from Beijing had injured his arm and needed to rest for a while, so he returned home. This time, he could stay at home for at least a month.
A few days ago, Xuemei received a package from the Lin family. The letter inside the package said that Lin Hongzhi was on a blind date recently and she planned to take advantage of his vacation to settle his lifelong affairs.
The snails were picked up by Han Chen and his colleagues while working in the paddy fields. They had been soaked in a bucket for several days, and the water had to be changed and cleaned every day. The dirt inside the snails had long been spit out. There were about twenty pounds of them.
Xuemei went to the kitchen and first took the snails from the two buckets to the side of the well. She rubbed them twice with well water, and after washing them clean, poured them all into a large iron pot. She added water to cover the snails, added the pre-cut ginger slices and knotted green onions, and then brought to a boil.
While watching the fire, Xuemei took out a pound and a half of meat from the well that she had bought at the commune early this morning. She removed the fat, about half a pound, and chopped the remaining pound of lean meat into minced meat, the finer the better.
After the meat was chopped, the snails in the large iron pot were cooked. Xuemei fished the snails out and placed them in a wooden barrel. Then she went to the yard and called out to Liu's mother. Liu's mother washed her hands, went to the house to get a needle, and brought the barrel full of snails into the yard. Sitting on a small stool, she began to use the needle to pick out the chewy parts of the snail meat. The remaining parts, which were now filled with small snails or snail excrement, affected the taste, so she threw them away and placed the selected snail meat in a wooden basin nearby.
Xuemei began to boil lard in the kitchen, using the half-pound of fat from the pork. After frying it, she picked out a few pieces, sprinkled them with sugar, and fed two pieces to each of the three people busy in the yard. She then tasted two pieces herself, fried the rest in the cupboard, and began to prepare the other ingredients.
I went to the vegetable patch in the courtyard and pulled some carrots—leftovers from last year, not many, just one square meter. The vegetable plots in front and behind the Liu family's yard mostly grew coarse grains like corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. Cucumbers, loofahs, and pumpkins were planted along the large courtyard wall. The Liu family's wall was large, so they planted a lot, too. They also planted a lot of peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, and other vegetables beneath it. Villagers generally didn't count plantings under the wall as part of their private plots; every family with a wall did the same.
Liu's parents intercropped beans and peas with corn, eliminating the need to plant bamboo poles in the ground. In the backyard, Liu's mother also planted half an acre of cotton, saying it was for Han Chen and Xuemei's future children.
In addition, today Liu's father also cleared some land in the vegetable garden in the front yard and planted ten watermelons. These were the seeds that Wang Weidong secretly gave to Liu's father when the villagers went to the grain station to buy grain stations, and asked him to go home and try planting them. There were twenty seeds, but only ten seeds were successfully grown into seedlings, and they were all seeded watermelons.
In addition to carrots, Xuemei also picked some fresh ginger, garlic, and freshly roasted green peppers.
After Xuemei washed the ingredients, she started to cut them one by one, cutting all the side dishes into cubes.
By the time Xuemei finished cutting the side dishes, it was already past four o'clock. Xuemei's family had returned home at three o'clock, and Liu's mother had only peeled a small portion of the snails. Xuemei quickly grabbed a needle, sat down next to Liu's mother, and began to peel the snail meat.
Xuemei and Liu's mother and daughter then worked together for over an hour, until around five o'clock, when they finally finished peeling over twenty pounds of snail meat. The snails they picked were quite large, yielding nearly five pounds of meat.
Xuemei twisted her neck and said to Liu's mother, "Mom, I'll take over from now. You take a break. You've been bending your head down for so long, your shoulders must be uncomfortable now!"
"Yes, my shoulders are sore now and I need to massage them! Then I'll sit here and rest!" Liu's mother replied.
Xuemei nodded, then carried the basin to the well and gently scrubbed the snails twice with her hands to remove excess sand and odor. She then drained the water in a colander. She then chopped the snails on a cutting board, scooped out the pig food from the large iron pot, cleaned the pot, and began to stir-fry the snails in chili sauce.
Xuemei heated oil in a large iron pot. As the weather was getting hotter, Xuemei planned to add more oil to facilitate preservation. She poured all the new oil from frying half a pound of fat into the large iron pot. However, Xuemei was afraid that it was not enough, so she added two spoonfuls of lard.
After the oil is hot, Xuemei first adds garlic seeds and diced ginger to stir-fry, then adds green peppers and stir-fry. Xuemei doesn't put in much green peppers, only about half a pound, so after adding the green peppers, Xuemei pours in a can of chopped peppers.
The chopped chili peppers at home are almost finished, and this is one of the last two bottles of chopped chili peppers that have not been opened.
Xuemei then added minced pork to the large iron pot and stir-fried it until it became white granules. She then added diced carrots and snail meat and stir-fried them. When the mixture was almost done, she added homemade chili powder, some salt, and some soy sauce.
Finally, Xuemei poured an appropriate amount of water into the large iron pot, brought it to a boil over high heat, and then simmered it over low heat until the soup turned red and thickened. Xuemei tasted the saltiness and thought it could be a little salty when making the sauce. Xuemei added an appropriate amount of salt and seasoned it before serving.
Then they waited for the snail chili sauce to cool down. During this time, Xuemei started to cook dinner. Liu's mother took a break and started to remove the molds and make earthen bricks again. Qingya and her two siblings had just come down from the mountain.
Xuemei was thinking about the freshly made sauce tonight, so she planned to steam some potato and rice, stir-fry some young pumpkin, and make some pickled vegetable soup to whet her appetite.
After dinner, after Liu's father had cleared the dishes, Xuemei and Liu's mother went to the kitchen and began to put the freshly made sauce into cans and seal them. The cans had been sterilized yesterday and sterilized again with boiling water before dinner, so the moisture inside had now dried up.
Xuemei had bought the canning lids yesterday at the commune's supply and marketing cooperative. Besides the snail chili sauce she'd made tonight, she'd also filled three and a half bottles. It was almost nine o'clock when Xuemei and Liu's mother sealed the cans, and both were feeling a bit tired.
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