Chapter 390 The New Chef Starts Cooking
It has been a long time since we have seen human civilization at this stage.
A washbasin was also installed in the toilet. Mu Xi was a little worried about water leakage, so he planned to install one first to try it out. If it was confirmed that there was no water leakage, he would install one on the first floor of the brick house. That way, he would not have to leave the house to wash.
Zhao Yeqing was looking at the shiny new stainless steel worktop in the kitchen and couldn't let go of it, touching it again and again. Mu Xi came out of the bathroom after checking the pipes and found Zhao Yeqing still stroking the cabinet countertop in the kitchen.
I was a little amused and confused:
"What we are saying is, can you be more indifferent to fame and fortune?"
Zhao Yeqing didn't even raise his head: "No, don't try that. When you found out that you could use running water at home, your expression wasn't much better."
Usually, Mu Xi does more of the heavy physical labor at home. Sometimes he has to take two showers a day, and boiling water is really troublesome. I also know some medical theory, so I usually don't take cold showers unless I have to.
After touching the countertop, Zhao Yeqing finally left the cupboard and walked to the refrigerator. He opened the door of the freezer area and looked around, thinking that tonight would be the first meal he would cook in the new kitchen. What kind of dishes should he cook to live up to this luxurious kitchen?
I looked around but couldn't find anything I was satisfied with. How can frozen food compare to fresh food?
Zhao Yeqing closed the refrigerator door and said, "Kill a chicken and a duck, and get a fish. We'll have a good meal tonight."
There are many chickens at home, and we can slaughter one for eating from time to time. There is no shortage of fish either. The only thing is that I haven’t eaten duck meat for many years, so I must satisfy my appetite today.
When it comes to eating duck, Zhao Yeqing believes that the best way to eat it is roast duck. The roast duck is coated with sweet bean sauce, topped with green onions and cucumbers, and rolled in a soft pancake.
Or the way it is eaten in Guangdong, the duck fresh from the oven is chopped into pieces and dipped in sweet and sour plum sauce, which is refreshing and not greasy.
You can also eat it the way Sichuan Province does it, where the chopped roast duck is put into a red oil stew and slow-cooked. The roasted duck skin is filled with the soup, and it tastes salty, fragrant, and slightly spicy, giving you a full taste of the aroma when you take a bite.
Zhao Yeqing almost couldn't control his saliva, but making a delicious roast duck would definitely not be possible in a short time. Even if he didn't use a hanging oven, it would take several hours to use the electric oven in the kitchen.
Now it was only two hours until dinner, and Zhao Yeqing didn't want to make a mediocre roast duck, so he had to give up the idea and settle for the next best thing, which was to make sour radish and duck soup.
She also considered stewing the duck or making three-cup duck, but these dishes required soy sauce, which she no longer had at home, and the brewed soy sauce would take another month before it could be used.
In her mind, sour radish and duck soup is one of the top five duck dishes. It is easy to prepare and the ingredients are readily available at home.
Mu Xi went out to kill ducks. Zhao Yeqing picked out three large pieces of sour radish from the pickle jar. These radishes were pickled with chili peppers. They were radishes harvested last winter. They had been pickled for several months. They were sour and spicy, and just smelling them made one's mouth water rapidly.
With the soup, the remaining fish and chicken can be made into dishes.
Zhao Yeqing shouted to Mu Xi who was killing ducks outside, "Give me a three-month-old tender chicken to fry."
After saying that, he took out a bag of chestnuts from the freezer of the refrigerator. This was last fall, when Mu Xi went to look for the chestnut tree again and picked some chestnuts. He froze them in the refrigerator before eating them all.
When the two of them first encountered the group of monkeys, they were near the chestnut tree, but when Mu Xi went to look for chestnuts, he did not meet them. He thought they really had never come back, but he did not expect that they caught him off guard.
When she thought of how disheveled Mu Xi looked when he came back that day, she couldn't help but laugh out loud.
Mu Xi stood at the window, watching the people inside grinning foolishly, not knowing what they were grinning about. He raised his hand and knocked on the screen window: "The duck has been taken care of, take it."
Zhao Yeqing quickly put away his smile, opened the window and let the duck in, and Mu Xi turned around to kill the chicken.
Chop the duck meat into pieces, blanch it in cold water, add ginger slices and chopped pickled radish, and pour into the pressure cooker.
Soup tastes best when cooked slowly over firewood. The small brick stove that used to be in the kitchen was moved by the two of them to the space in the brick wall. They can use it there when needed without making the kitchen dirty.
Zhao Yeqing thought about it and decided to use an electric pressure cooker. After all, many small appliances have never been used since they were brought home, and they need to be plugged in occasionally, otherwise they will easily break down.
Today is the opening day of the new kitchen, so it would be more appropriate to use some small appliances to cook.
The chicken was decided to be braised with chestnuts. Zhao Yeqing took out a piece of tofu from the refrigerator. Two days ago, while waiting for the tiles to dry, she took the time to grind some beans. She had originally planned to use them to make moldy tofu and fermented bean curd after the kitchen was turned on, but now she took a piece to cook the fish.
After frying the tofu until both sides are golden brown, take it out and set aside. The fish is naked carp, which has very few bones and does not need to be scaled. Cut it into pieces and marinate it with onion and ginger to remove the fishy smell.
The fish must be cooked just before eating, otherwise it will become fishy when it cools down.
The chicken has to be stewed in advance. Zhao Yeqing turned on the induction cooker, put the pot on it, and lubricated the pot with the chicken fat that was originally shaved off when processing the chicken. After the golden chicken fat was squeezed out and became shriveled, he scooped out the oil residue and poured the chicken in to stir-fry.
Chicken that has not been blanched needs to be stir-fried until the water evaporates and the skin turns slightly yellow, then add water and cover and simmer.
There was no soy sauce at home, only a lot of dark soy sauce left for coloring. This thing was not as fresh and fragrant as soy sauce or light soy sauce, and was rarely used except for coloring. Zhao Yeqing could only put a little bit of it in to adjust the color.
The chicken needs to be simmered for more than 40 minutes, and the chestnuts should be added in the last 20 minutes.
Mu Xi cleaned up the feathers of the chickens and ducks killed in the backyard, returned to the kitchen and saw that the rice had not been cooked yet, so he washed the rice and put it into the rice cooker.
He now truly felt the joy of small household appliances. Before, in order to avoid creating rice crust, they did not dare to use a large iron pot to cook rice. Instead, they put rice in bowls and simmered them one bowl at a time.
If it is not cooked well at the beginning, it is often undercooked, and we don’t want to waste it, so we either have to eat it anyway, or simply add some water and cook it into porridge, which is particularly painful to eat.
Now that we have electric rice cookers, we just wash the rice, add water, put the lid on, and plug it in. All we have to do is hear the dripping sound and then we don’t have to worry about anything else.
You know what, it really feels good.
The rice is not cooked quickly, so it will take about 40 minutes. By then, the duck soup should be ready.
Zhao Yeqing looked at the time and decided to put the chestnuts in and then start frying the fish.
There has to be a vegetarian dish as well.
There was no kitchen during this period, so the two could only cook casually in the house, sometimes frying pancakes, sometimes cooking noodles. The vegetarian dishes they ate were either cucumber shreds rolled in pancakes, or two vegetable leaves thrown in when cooking noodles. They were really tired of the taste.
Zhao Yeqing went out to the vegetable garden to see if there was anything fresh.
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