Chapter 105 Steamed Egg Custard
The poisoned potatoes were first piled up in the corner of the bedroom. Zuo Shan and Pan Duole picked out all the wild vegetable leaves they had collected that day, selecting those that looked good and tasted good, and piled them in the largest bamboo basin.
When Aunt Zhou came over, Zuo Shan pushed the bamboo basin in front of her and let her choose for herself.
Aunt Zhou didn't rush to pick wild vegetables. First, she opened the black plastic bag she was carrying and took out a bluish egg that was as big as an ostrich egg.
"These are mutated wild duck eggs. A friend of Old Wu's from a mercenary group came over this morning to process a batch of mutated beast meat and gave him two of them."
I was thinking that since you're pregnant and need more nutrition, I'm sending you one. You absolutely can't refuse.
"Of course, I won't stand on ceremony with you. I won't pay you for the wild vegetables today," Aunt Zhou said with a smile.
"That won't do. Wild vegetables are worth nothing, a sack of them is only worth a few dozen yuan. But the wild duck eggs you brought are something that money can't buy. They're too valuable, I can't accept them!" Zuo Shan still declined.
"The fried soybean dregs you gave us yesterday weren't ordinary stuff either. They were delicious and very filling."
And the meat whistle you gave me before, which I ate with Lao Wu, was made from a mutated beast, and it tasted incredibly delicious.
"My husband, Lao Wu, said he hasn't been of much help to you, and he feels really bad about always eating your food. If you don't accept these wild duck eggs, we won't dare to eat your food anymore," Aunt Zhou said.
"Alright then, I'll invite you to try some delicious food later." Zuo Shan nodded and pushed a whole bamboo basin of wild vegetables to her. Aunt Zhou had no choice but to take the basin back.
Mao Li picked up the wild duck egg and weighed it; it actually weighed over four pounds!
This isn't Earth, where vegetables and eggs sometimes cost about the same. In this nutrient-deficient wasteland, the price of eggs is hard to estimate, and the key is that even if you have money, you might not be able to buy them.
She had visited several supermarkets, but had never seen eggs for sale.
During the Great Cataclysm, most of the livestock died, and a few that mutated survived. However, they were no longer willing to be raised and slaughtered by humans and fled into the wild.
Nowadays, at least outside of District 40, I've never heard of any place raising chickens, ducks, geese, pigs, cattle, or sheep. If you want to eat eggs, you can only dream about it.
After seeing Aunt Zhou off, Zuo Shan began trying to remove the poison from the poisonous potatoes.
The TV program specifically introduced that the simplest way to detoxify cassava is by soaking it in water. After peeling and slicing the cassava, soak it in water for 4 to 6 hours, and then steam or boil it to completely remove its toxins.
Mao Li weighed all the cassava, and the total weight was a staggering 2100 kilograms!
Zuo Shan only saw that it was piled up like a small mountain, but he didn't expect it to be so heavy!
If you peel and grind it into powder, you could get at least eight or nine hundred kilograms, enough for food rations during extremely cold weather.
Although Zuo Shan was still unsure whether she could completely remove the toxicity of the mutated poisonous potato, she already had high hopes that it would become her staple food.
Just to be on the safe side, she decided to soak it for a whole day, a full 36 hours, determined to get rid of the toxins.
Worried that it would spoil if soaked for too long, she added some salt to extend its shelf life.
She needs to get results as soon as possible. Once it's proven that the mutated poisonous potato is edible, she will process all the poisonous potatoes harvested this time into powder.
The TV program said that tapioca flour can be stored for 1 to 2 years.
After all, Xiao Bao's space can't be occupied by this thing forever; it has many other uses.
After moving into District 48, Zuo Shan considered buying a refrigerator to store food, but when she learned that electricity here cost 2 silver coins per kilowatt-hour, she decided not to buy any appliances.
Especially now that it's extremely hot, with an average temperature of 78°C, maintaining the refrigerator's temperature requires at least 5 kWh of electricity per day. Therefore, except for certain medicines in hospitals that require low-temperature storage, most businesses and households in District 48 do not use refrigerators.
Fortunately, they have Xiao Bao's space, which also has a preservation function, but it can only store a small amount of food, since the space has other uses as well.
Large quantities of food are still stored using the most primitive method of sun-drying. Scavengers dry the wild vegetables they collect in the summer and rely on dried vegetables to stave off hunger throughout the winter.
Early the next morning, Zuo Shan cracked open the mutated wild duck egg that Aunt Zhou had given her. It wasn't that she couldn't keep leftover steamed buns in her doghouse; she was just worried that if left for too long, ducklings would hatch inside.
Putting aside whether she could even raise ducklings, the place she lives in simply doesn't meet the conditions for raising ducks. Her small 50-square-meter yard is also used for growing vegetables.
The wild duck eggs were quite large. She used one-third of them to make steamed egg custard. She stirred them, added salt and water, and when they were done cooking, she added a few drops of oil from the meat sauce and sprinkled some wild chive bits that Pandora had collected the day before.
The steamed egg custard on the left was steamed in a large bamboo basin. After it was done, half of it was sent to Aunt Zhou. Don't underestimate this half; it was as much as a full lunchbox.
After processing this third, grease a frying pan with some oil and fry the remaining portion into an omelet.
It's a pity that oil is so precious, otherwise we could fry eggs with it, that would be so satisfying.
Each person received a small piece of the fried egg pancake, and the rest were vacuum-packed and stored in Xiao Bao's space to be eaten slowly.
Uncle Wu and Aunt Zhou were amazed by her superb cooking skills after eating the steamed egg custard she made. Zuo Shan didn't hide anything and wrote down the recipe in detail, sending it to Uncle Wu's wristwatch.
The elderly couple felt more and more that giving Xiao Shanzi and the others an egg was the right choice; otherwise, they probably would never have tasted such a soft, smooth, and savory steamed egg custard in their entire lives.
They had obtained wild duck eggs more than once before, but they only knew how to boil them in water. Wild duck eggs naturally have a fishy smell, and although they tasted much better than ordinary wild vegetables when boiled, they were far inferior to the steamed egg custard made by Zuo Shan.
Even Aunt Zhou, who doesn't care much about the taste of food, couldn't help but exclaim: No wonder there is such a thing as a chef, the food made by a good chef is just different.
The same egg can be enlarged by a small fan, and it tastes so good it's almost unrecognizable as an egg.
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