Volume 1: Reborn in the 1980s, selling lunch boxes with my mother Chapter 31 My younger brother is a white-cut black
After dinner, Jiang Cheng took the initiative to take on the task of washing the pots and dishes. Hu Qiongfang washed her face. The mother and daughter each took a shovel and picked up two buckets, and slipped to the riverbank like thieves.
Fortunately, they had eaten an hour in advance. At this moment, smoke was rising from the village, and every household was cooking. The men who had returned from work also poured a glass of cheap liquor, sat at the table, and ate a plate of fried tofu with peppers, using the numbness of alcohol to relieve the fatigue brought by heavy labor.
There was no one outside Zhuangzi.
The mother and daughter walked all the way into the water chestnut bushes, and after passing through a large patch of water chestnuts, they came to a relatively soft mudflat.
Hu Qiongfang stamped her feet and nodded: "Let's try digging two shovels here."
Jiang Tian followed Hu Qiongfang's example and squatted down to observe. Generally, where loaches are found, there will be traces of loaches crawling, or very small holes. After finding them, she dug down. Sure enough, after one shovel, she saw a fat loach quickly drilled into the mud and disappeared.
Boy, you run pretty fast.
Jiang Tian refused to admit defeat. He made two sounds, spat into his palms, rubbed them to increase the friction, gripped the shovel tightly, dug out the silt, and immediately threw it into the water chestnut bush next to him with a snap.
The two fat loaches were knocked dizzy and before they could burrow into the ground to escape, they were grabbed by the tomboy Jiang Tian.
"Where are you going?" Jiang Tian happily picked up the two loaches and threw them into the bucket.
When I looked up, I saw that Hu Qiongfang had already caught several.
Ms. Hu is really a good worker. There are no fancy moves when digging loaches. With one shovel, the loach just drilled into the mud with its tail sticking out. Ms. Hu grabbed the tail, pulled it out, and threw it into the bucket.
That was so steady, accurate and ruthless!
Seeing that Ms. Hu worked as fiercely as a tiger and dug out a whole area of the ground in one breath, Jiang Tian was not to be outdone and started digging quickly.
You know what, probably no one has ever come to dig here. There are not only loaches under the mud, but also eels and turtles!
The first person to dig up the soft-shelled turtle was Hu Qiongfang.
When Jiang Tian saw her mother coming over with a disc-shaped object, she thought she had dug up some iron plate or something.
Scrap is still quite valuable in this era. If it is really an iron plate, it can be sold as scrap and be enough to buy half a pound of meat.
Unexpectedly, it turned out to be a wild turtle!
Jiang Tian exclaimed in her heart at that moment.
If this happened decades later, a wild turtle this big would be sold for at least a few hundred dollars, right?
But unfortunately, it is not very valuable now.
Because there are too many of these things in the countryside.
Especially here, Jiang Tian still remembers one year when it rained heavily, she went to the toilet in the backyard and encountered a big turtle lying behind their toilet!
Jiang Tian was almost scared to tears at that time, because the turtle was so big that it was almost as big as their washbasin.
I heard from the old people in the village that these huge turtles are all human-like and are almost becoming spirits. Eating them would harm one's virtue. In the end, her father held the turtle in his hands and sent it back to the river.
Because there are so many of these things, and although they look big, there is actually not much meat, and they are very troublesome to handle, so not many local people are willing to eat them.
However, what Jiang Tian didn't expect was that her mother didn't throw it away, but picked it up and put it in a bucket, planning to send it to the provincial road tomorrow to see if there are any restaurants that want it.
"Anyway, I found it for free. I can sell it for a few cents. I can buy you two popsicles." Hu Qiongfang said to herself.
Jiang Tian really has a new respect for Ms. Hu.
She always thought that Hu Qiongfang was an old workhorse who only knew how to farm and raise pigs. Unexpectedly, after just a trip to the provincial road to sell eels, Ms. Hu's mind was already full of business ideas.
So, really don’t look down on housewives.
Every housewife, before becoming a wife and mother, is a potential stock fighting in the workplace!
The mother and daughter dug on the river bank for more than an hour and were sweating profusely.
But the harvest was also amazing. I actually dug up a full bucket of loaches.
In addition there were two turtles, one big and one small, and a dozen eels.
On the way back, Hu Qiongfang cut some water chestnuts and piled them on top of the water bucket. Jiang Tian also took a fertilizer bag and filled it with water chestnuts and carried it on his back.
The villagers saw them from afar, but if they didn't look closely, they would have thought they were going to cut water chestnuts.
In the evening, Hu Qiongfang slaughtered the rat snake and stewed a small pot of snake soup. She did not eat it herself, but divided it into two large bowls for her son and daughter to eat.
Jiang Tian and Jiang Cheng drank the delicious snake soup while picking up some food for Hu Qiongfang.
Jiang Tian is still the chef for tonight's meal. There's nothing he can do about it as Jiang Cheng's taste for food has been spoiled by his sister.
But this boy was a bit naughty. He was afraid that his mother would take charge of the cooking, so he deliberately reminded his mother during the cooking process that the beans in the vegetable garden seemed to have not been picked for several days. In order not to let them get old, it would be better to pick them all while he was at home.
This way, when Hu Qiongfang and Jiang Tian take the bus to the provincial road to sell eels tomorrow, he can help at home by blanching the beans, tearing them apart, and drying them into dried beans.
There are really not many good foods to eat in the countryside in winter, and things in the market are expensive. Dried beans are an indispensable dish in their family every winter.
Even though they eat so much beans that they vomit in the summer, when winter comes and they eat so much radishes and cabbages that they vomit, they will start to miss the beans that they once despised.
Moreover, there are many ways to eat dried beans. When paired with different ingredients, they can present different flavors.
Such dishes as dried beans stewed with pork ribs, dried beans roasted with chicken, dried beans stewed with bacon, dried beans fried with sausage... Let me put it this way, for many housewives who are in charge of the cooking at home, this home can do without men, but it absolutely cannot do without dried beans!
Sure enough, when Hu Qiongfang heard her son say that the beans in the vegetable garden had not been picked for several days, she put down the bucket and hurried out with the vegetable basket.
The job of cooking returned to Jiang Tian again.
Jiang Tian was stunned for a moment, and suddenly realized that she might never really understand her biological mother and brother.
I thought my mother was just an ordinary housewife. After just one trip to the provincial road, she started to figure out how to do business without any guidance.
I thought he was just a simple and kind-hearted younger brother of a primary school bully, but he turned out to be a white-cut black?
In her previous life, Jiang Tian worked in a construction site canteen. She was surrounded by a bunch of men who liked to tell dirty jokes. She didn't dare go anywhere at night and would hide in the dormitory alone. When she was bored, she would read novels on her mobile phone to pass the time.
Based on her years of experience in reading novels, if this was a romance novel, her brother would definitely be the legendary "evil-hearted male protagonist".
After realizing this, Jiang Tian couldn't help but start observing her biological mother and younger brother carefully.
