Considering the hardship of her fourth sister raising a child alone and cooking, she transformed into a little cook the day after Niu Feng left in the middle of the night.
"Sis, there's nothing else I can do to help you, but I'll cook for you for three days and stock up on food."
"Make whatever has no flavor, since I'm feeding a baby and they can't eat anything too greasy or spicy anyway."
That's what they say, but taking care of children is hard enough as it is. If you have to worry about this and that on top of that, how pitiful would that be?
So that day she kneaded fifty kilograms of dough, a whole bag of flour, using every basin and every other usable container in the house.
To distinguish each type of dumpling, she also juices vegetables and fruits to color them, making the cooked dumplings not only beautiful but also delicious.
For example, spinach, purple cabbage, dragon fruit, tomatoes, celery, yellow bell peppers, mulberries, pomegranates, strawberries, oranges, papayas, etc., are all easy to color.
Cuihong was strong, and she was responsible for kneading the various juices prepared by Xiaojiu into the dough after the children fell asleep, kneading it firmly, and letting it rise.
Xiao Jiu then went directly into her own space to prepare the fillings. The two sisters worked together to quickly ship the goods.
The meat was taken to the space and ground with an electric meat grinder, and all kinds of vegetables such as scallions, ginger and minced with the meat grinder as well.
Finally, more than ten kinds of dumpling fillings were prepared, including celery and pork, pork and scallion, chives and pork, carrot and wood ear fungus, pork and fennel, rapeseed and egg, mackerel filling, mutton and scallion, mutton and carrot, and shrimp filling.
The color of each ingredient was diluted with water, resulting in a light-colored dough with a slight sheen, so the natural flavors of the vegetables and fruits were not strong.
"This is the first time I've ever seen such beautiful dumplings. You really went to great lengths."
When Cuihong saw the finished product, she was deeply moved. Her sister had gone through so much so that she could have meat to eat.
After kneading the dough, Xiao Jiu sat down at the table on the kang (heated brick bed) and started rolling out the wrappers and making dumplings.
"I'll pack a few of each kind, and we'll taste them at noon. If any don't taste good, we'll make more."
Why bother? If you cook it like this, it won't taste good. You can eat the dumplings and soup together.
The dumpling wrappers even come with their own fruit and vegetable juices, making them incredibly flavorful.
"It's good, but it's too troublesome to do and it's tiring."
Isn't it tiring? And this noodle dish was made by Cuihong; if she had made it herself, she would have been exhausted.
She used fifty pounds of flour, and she didn't even remember how much meat and seasoning she used for the dumpling filling, but it took her two whole days to make them.
I've been staying up until 10 p.m. every night for the past two days. Basically, aside from eating and cooking, I've spent all my time making dumplings.
She took the wrapped dumplings to the freezer to freeze them solid, and then packed them into bags according to their different flavors.
In the end, everything was handed over to Tang Cuihong. She roughly calculated that fifty catties of flour, plus eighty catties of filling, and various vegetable and fruit juices added when kneading the dough, yielded about one hundred and fifty catties of dumplings. At sixty dumplings per catty, that's about nine thousand dumplings.
Cuihong can eat about twenty or thirty dumplings in one meal, which is half a pound. On average, that's three hundred meals. If she eats dumplings once a day, she can eat them for a year.
Xiao Jiu also prepared some pre-made foods for Cui Hong, including various meatballs, frozen buns, steamed dumplings, corn, hand-pulled pancakes, cornbread, zongzi (sticky rice dumplings), various steamed buns with red bean paste filling, grilled sausages, pizza, pies, etc. These are probably the unhealthy foods that all mothers in later generations would talk about.
It's just an emergency; eating it occasionally is harmless.
These past two days have left her exhausted, with a sore back and aching waist. On the third day, she wanted to make some more nutritious soups for Cuihong, but her sister, who felt sorry for her, stopped her.
"No need to make a fuss. Get some rest today and go back tomorrow. You must miss your grandparents and older sister, haven't seen them in so long."
It's alright for making soup; I don't need to keep an eye on it. I have enough time to make it myself later.
Despite saying that, she still cooked two large pots of lotus root, pork rib, and corn soup. The fragrant aroma must have tempted many people.
She used a whole rack of pork ribs in these two large pots, which were full of ingredients and had a rich, flavorful broth, making them top-quality dairy products.
When Xiao Jiu packed a large basket of pig's trotters for Cui Hong, she refused.
“I don’t like this stuff, but it’s okay. There are all kinds of fish too. That’s enough. You can take it back and give it to your older sister to help her recover.”
It's the middle of summer, and it's not a good place for my older sister to put it!
On the morning of the fourth day after arriving, Xiao Jiu got up at four o'clock to cook porridge and boil eggs. Fortunately, Cui Hong had plenty of eggs, and she always cooked a whole pot at once, so it was convenient to take them out and eat them anytime.
After breakfast, I would appear near the supply vehicle at five o'clock sharp. In the summer, the supply vehicle would set off earlier, sometimes returning at nine or ten o'clock.
After all, the issue of food preservation must also be taken seriously.
Cuihong brought the child to see him off, and the people in the family compound breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Xiaojiu leave.
"Good heavens, it's finally gone!" If it hadn't left, the children at home wouldn't have just been crying from hunger, they would have been dying of hunger.
——
There are quite a few trains from West Los Angeles to Los Angeles, and she arrived in Los Angeles at 1 p.m.
After getting off the bus, I ate a bowl of mutton soup noodles and then took a bus back to my county from the bus station near the train station.
We didn't stop in Los Angeles, since we'll be coming back on the way back to visit Grandpa and Grandma Weng then.
Now that her parents knew her hidden secret, Xiao Jiu got out of the car, found a secluded spot, and rode her bicycle back to their rented place.
"Oh my, my dear granddaughter,"
The moment Grandpa opened the door and saw Xiaojiu saluting him, his eyes reddened and his voice choked with emotion.
"You look just like him, so much like him! You're definitely a descendant of the Tao family. That salute you gave just now... I thought I saw one of your two uncles!"
The old man started crying as he spoke. Xiao Jiu didn't expect her grandfather to be so sentimental, so she quickly held his arm and whispered words of comfort.
Hearing the commotion, Grandma anxiously called out from inside the house, "What... happened?"
"Grandma, it's me, Xiaojiu is back! Your eldest granddaughter is back!"
The elderly couple had clearly just woken up not long ago. When the grandmother heard the noise, she shakily moved off the bed.
Seeing how frail the two who were once so energetic had become, Xiao Jiu felt sorry for them and helped them wash their faces and hands.
Then I took out the canned yellow peaches I had brought back and fed them to them slowly.
The sun had already set. After helping them sit down in the courtyard, I finally had time to go check on the kitchen.
The courtyard wasn't big, with three rooms. The central room was the main room, and the east and west wing rooms were where my grandparents and parents lived. My older brother had set up a bed and a table in the main room to do his homework.
The kitchen was in the east corner, next to a small shed where firewood and coal briquettes were stored.
The toilet is in the northwest corner of the west side. It's small but complete. For two yuan a month, this kind of house is worth it.
"Grandma, what would you like to eat tonight? I'll make it for you."
Grandma's lips trembled, and after a long while, she managed to utter the word "noodles." Grandpa chimed in from the side.
"Yes, dumplings on the way up, noodles on the way down. I just got back from drinking, so I'm having noodles."
"Okay, okay, then we'll have fish soup noodles tonight. Wait here, I'll make it right away."
So Xiao Jiu quickly went to knead the dough. While the dough was resting, he specially fried a fish in a large iron pot, mashed it up, and brought it to a boil over high heat.
Not long after my parents returned, my brother came back too. The fish soup had turned milky white. We skimmed out the useless scraps and started making noodles...
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