In the countryside, there seems to be endless work. Diligent people get up before dawn, first check on their own fields, then go home to cook and clean. After eating, when the morning dew has mostly evaporated, they start going to the fields to gather grass, apply fertilizer, turn the soil, level the ground, and so on. Then they sow seeds and begin a new round of growth.
In the warm spring of March, spinach grows so fast that you can't eat it all. So my mother's snack shop specially launched a vegetable bun that combines spinach and chives.
Roll out the dough thinly, place it on the griddle, add the washed vegetables, quickly spread another dough on top, and tightly seal the vegetables between the two doughs until both sides are decorated. Place it on a steamer rack, and cover it with box after box of vegetable buns. The vegetables inside are basically cooked through. When eating, flip it from the top to the bottom at once and start eating from the bottom box.
Dipping it in a sauce made with sesame oil, soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, and chili, it's absolutely irresistible.
No wonder their shop has been in short supply ever since they started selling this. The old man has to go to the village every day to buy spinach and newly sprouted chives. Of course, these vegetables are not worth much, and chives are more expensive, but the demand is also low. They mainly rely on spinach to make ends meet, so they are still quite profitable.
If you're lucky, you can even crack an egg inside; it tastes even better that way.
Now their shop is so popular that her father leaves at dawn and doesn't return until dark, which is very hard work for him.
To free up more time for their father to buy ingredients, everyone discussed it and Zhao Di went to help as well. She even practiced rolling out the dough at home for a while. All the three women had to do there was put together with some boards.
The old man also said that if the business can be completely stabilized this year, he will rent a house in the city so that everyone will not have to work so hard.
After Zhaodi left, Pandi stayed home to help the old lady tidy up the house. Of course, the boys would also do their best to help with chores after school.
Especially when it comes to farm work, you can't just rely on the elderly. After Qingming Festival, when it's crucial to plant vegetables, Tao Changyi has to come back to help.
Fortunately, with Zhao Di by his side, Tao Changyi could quickly return home after delivering the vegetables, spending more time at home than before, and thus becoming a great help.
So the task of feeding the chickens and ducks fell to Xiaojiu. At first, everyone was worried, so Xiaojiu demonstrated how to feed the animals on the spot. Only then did Grandma feel at ease leaving her alone at home while everyone else went to work in the fields.
Who would have thought that it's so great to be home alone?
For her safety, her grandparents even built a makeshift toilet for them in a corner of the front yard. It was just a hole dug in the ground, a jar placed inside, and corn stalks placed around it to block the view. This way, they could add fertilizer and prevent them from walking through the alleys into their main yard.
So the grandparents were able to lock the door connecting the main yard and the front yard.
Once the gates to the main courtyard and backyard were locked, she was left alone at home. She ate the breakfast her grandmother left for her, which was usually a bowl of goat milk and a steamed bun or vegetable bun. If she got up early, they would eat together; if she didn't want to get up and stayed in bed, she would get up and eat by herself.
If her grandparents have enough time, they will feed the chickens, ducks, and geese in advance; if they don't have enough time, she will take care of them.
We hadn't finished eating the cabbage from winter, but we had to peel off a lot of rotten leaves, and some of them had already started to flower inside. So we only kept the edible parts, and removed the rotten parts of the inedible parts. The rest were chopped up and mixed with bran or something similar to feed the chickens and ducks.
Nowadays, about eight out of ten radishes are pithy inside, meaning they've lost all their moisture. I would never eat such radishes when I have vegetables available; I would feed them to poultry. I would only cook them if I had absolutely no other vegetables at home.
Xiao Jiu doesn't like stir-fried radishes. In fact, in the countryside, anyone who eats too much of any seasonal vegetable will get tired of it.
Springtime staples are spinach, radishes, cabbage, shepherd's purse, chives, lettuce, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and the like. Eating them every day would make anyone feel sick.
In the summer, it turns into eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, green beans, garlic sprouts, cucumbers, sweet potato leaves, and all kinds of green vegetables. That's a bit better, but you definitely have to change the way you prepare them.
In autumn, when all kinds of vegetables have ripened, what's left are mostly misshapen gourds and cracked dates. Even the flat beans in the corner of the wall, which have worms inside, you still have to pull out the worms, wash them clean, dry them, and keep them to eat in winter. You have to think about winter for everything.
As winter approaches, it's time for a new round of scallions, cabbage, radishes, spinach, cilantro, and garlic sprouts...
Because the weather is neither too hot nor too cold in spring, it will be very comfortable to work. So when Grandma left in the morning, she told her that they wouldn't be back for lunch. She had steamed some sweet potato, potato, and vegetable dumplings for her to eat, and that they would cook something nice for her when they came back in the afternoon.
They took these same kinds of dry rations with them when they left.
Since she was home alone, she rummaged through the warehouse several times before finally finding the food she wanted to eat in front of her.
She noticed that there wasn't much oil left in the lard jar at home, so she took out some pork fat from her storage space, not daring to take too much, for fear that her grandmother would find out.
She diced the pork, added a little water and salt, and rendered about one or two pounds of oil. She chopped up the dry, burnt, and yellow pork cracklings along with the chives, then mixed some white flour from the warehouse, spread the filling on it, rolled it up, rolled it into a pancake, added oil to the bottom of the iron pan, and tossed the pancake in to start cooking.
She's small and not very agile, and what she made looked rather shabby, but once it was cooked, it actually tasted pretty good, and most importantly, it really satisfied my craving.
She baked a dozen or so pancakes, using a lot of oil, and put them all in the warehouse to eat slowly when she got hungry.
Then they cleaned up the kitchen and boiled some water. At noon, they ate these flatbreads and drank a bowl of hot water, which solved their problem of food and clothing.
Xiao Jiu was allowed by her parents to live at school from a young age, but she later found it difficult to get used to living at school. The main reason was that the daily management of the school made it very inconvenient for her to wash up. So she rented a house off-campus and lived by herself. She also likes to watch food programs, so she has some knowledge of various cuisines, from the difficult ones to the simple ones.
She has no problem cooking for herself. This isn't ancient times, where starting a fire is troublesome. Nowadays, we have matches, which light easily. And the materials are simple, like corn stalks and sesame stalks. Making pancakes and boiling water isn't a big problem as long as she's careful.
She didn't dare waste the sweet potatoes and potatoes that were steaming on the pot; she put them in the warehouse so she could grab something to eat when she got hungry.
After eating and drinking her fill and cleaning up, she would start searching through all the rooms, especially the room where the grain was stored. She would go in and rummage through the family's supplies, adding more if needed, and turning the grain up and down if the difference was too obvious. Sometimes she would even tie it to a bag and stir it up and down. She put in a lot of effort, just to make sure the grain would last longer.
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