Volume 1: Reborn in the 1980s, selling lunch boxes with my mother Chapter 44 Braised Eggs with Prawns
While Hu Qiongfang was busy digging loaches and fishing for eels, Jiang Tian was also not idle.
She tried to make all the noodle toppings that became popular in later generations.
Ms. Hu and Mr. Jiang became the guinea pigs in the family.
Jiang Tian first made shredded eel noodles and river shrimp noodles.
Neither of these toppings can be prepared in advance.
Because eels and river shrimps are delicious only when they are cooked and eaten immediately, but Jiang Tian has already planned to buy a freezer when they open the store.
Estimate the amount to be sold at each meal, and kill and shred the eels in advance. Put them in the freezer so that they will not freeze immediately after an hour or two. When customers order them, they can take them out and cook them. The taste is almost the same as if they were freshly killed.
Since the goal was to open a shop and make money, Jiang Tian asked Jiang Cheng to stand by and use a watch to check the time for her. She wanted to calculate how much time it would take to cook a bowl of eel noodles and a bowl of river shrimp noodles.
It is not difficult to make eel noodles. Heat the oil in a pan, pour in the chopped ginger, garlic slices, and onion, and stir-fry evenly.
Then pour in the chopped eel shreds and stir-fry quickly, then add salt, rice vinegar, cooking wine and a spoonful of homemade soybean paste.
When the eel shreds change color, add the chopped green and red peppers.
Stir-fry until the green and red peppers are cooked, then pour in the prepared starch paste to thicken, stir-fry a few times, and pour in the pulled noodles that have been cooked in advance in a bowl.
Sprinkle with chopped green onions and a bowl of delicious eel noodles is ready.
It’s a pity that there are no shredded wood ear and shiitake mushrooms, otherwise it would taste better.
However, if you don't have it, then forget it. Both of these side dishes are quite expensive.
The principle that Jiang Tian is currently following is: in the early stages of starting a business, try not to spend money where you can avoid it.
Jiang Cheng widened his eyes, staring at his watch in disbelief, and reported a number: "Three minutes and twenty-two seconds, sister, are you the reincarnation of the God of Cooking?"
Jiang Tian stretched out her finger and flicked her brother's head.
"Come on, eat it while it's hot. It won't taste good if you reheat it after it cools down."
As she said this, she asked Jiang Cheng to look at her watch while she reheated the oil pan and began to try making river shrimp noodles.
River shrimp noodles are even quicker to make.
The previous procedures are similar. After the seasonings are sautéed, pour in the washed grass shrimp, add cooking wine, vinegar, and a little soy sauce, stir-fry until the grass shrimp change color, then add salt and half a bowl of water.
After boiling, the grass shrimps in the pot turn into a beautiful orange-red color. Finally, beat two local eggs, stir the eggs evenly, pour them in, cover the pot and simmer for half a minute.
This is a local way of eating it, called "grass shrimp stewed with eggs".
The reason for doing this is that the local grass shrimps are very small and cannot be picked up with chopsticks after they are cooked.
Just pour a layer of egg drops on the prepared grass shrimps and wrap the grass shrimps with the egg liquid, so that you can pick up a large piece with one pinch.
The small grass shrimps do not need to be shelled and are delicious when paired with local eggs.
In order to try the food, Jiang Tian made small portions of noodles, adding only half a bowl of noodles to each bowl.
Jiang Cheng had already finished his small bowl of eel noodles and was staring at the grass shrimp and egg stew in the pot.
Jiang Tian smiled. Fortunately, there was more grass shrimp and egg in the pot. She took some noodles from the pot and made two more bowls of river shrimp noodles.
Jiang Cheng quickly reported the time to his sister: "This time it took four minutes and twenty seconds."
Jiang Tiantian nodded and asked him to write down the two numbers.
The brother and sister gulped down the river shrimp noodles, and Jiang Cheng almost licked the bottom of the bowl clean.
"Sister, this river shrimp noodle is really delicious. Let's make it next time. Don't worry, I'll pick the shrimps and wash them!"
At this moment, Jiang Cheng didn't mind that it was too troublesome to pick the grass shrimps.
If he had known that the shrimps were so delicious, he wouldn't have been bothered by going to the ditch to pick them every day, right?
When she was free in the afternoon, Jiang Tian went to the town to buy some peppercorns, star anise, bay leaves and the like, and also bought two bags of dark soy sauce. She came back and prepared a stew, and put the dried tofu and bean skin bought in the town into it and stewed it.
I also boiled a few local eggs, peeled the eggshells and put them in the stew.
I originally wanted to try some braised pig head and pig intestines.
There is no market today. At this time, there is no pig intestines or even fresh pork for sale in town.
Jiang Tian once again missed the supermarkets that filled the streets decades later.
In the past two days, the Jiang family has not cooked a single meal, and every meal has been noodles.
I have river shrimp noodles in the morning, smoked fish noodles at noon, and shredded eel noodles in the evening.
In addition to the freshly cooked toppings, Jiang Tian also prepared a number of side dishes that customers can “select” at their own noodle shop in the future.
Needless to say, the stewed dishes I made before include stir-fried minced pork with sour beans, stir-fried pork liver with sour peppers, shredded pork with green peppers, shredded pork with snow vegetable, stir-fried shredded beans with Chinese sausage, and stir-fried snails with soy sauce...
In short, there is only one principle for side dishes: try to use seasonal vegetables that are available in large quantities and cheap for vegetarian dishes, and all other dishes can be bought in the vegetable market, such as pork, pork liver, etc.
You can also pickle sour peppers, sour beans and snow vegetables at home.
Jiang Tian also took the opportunity to encourage Ms. Hu to make the yard bigger when she finds someone to approve the land, and to build a few more sheds at the back so that they can pickle their own sauerkraut.
"Mom, we can't leave our vegetable garden idle. We can plant some beans, Chinese mustard, peppers and the like. We don't have to take care of them. We can come back every few days to water them. The harvest will be enough for our family to make sauerkraut."
The locals can’t do without various side dishes when eating anything.
Everything can be pickled, such as pickled beans, pickled peppers, pickled radishes, and pickled cabbage.
Unexpectedly, Hu Qiongfang's ideas were more advanced than her daughter's.
If she was only 50% sure about opening a noodle shop before, after eating the noodles made by her daughter for two consecutive days, plus the various toppings, she is now at least 80% sure that this noodle shop will make money.
Since I can make money...
"If we are too busy, we can just go back to the village and harvest some vegetables."
"Now the vegetables in every household's vegetable garden in the village grow so fast that we can't eat them all."
"At noon, your aunt Cuizhi told me that her family has too many lentils this year, and they are about to break the two trees in the vegetable garden. Her mother-in-law wants to cut down two lentil seedlings and asked me to pick two baskets to make sour lentils or dry some lentil shreds."
Amazing! Ms. Hu has become a capitalist and knows how to purchase raw materials!
Jiang Tian heard this word from the big bosses who came to eat in the construction site canteen when she was cooking in her previous life.
Anyway, Jiang Tian felt that Hu Qiongfang was right. In this day and age, many seasonal vegetables in rural areas were incredibly cheap.
Especially in summer and autumn, when there are too many vegetables in the vegetable garden to eat them all, you have to pick them with great effort and carry them to the town to set up a stall to sell them. The price of one cent or five cents per pound is still not enough to justify the hassle.
So many people are like Aunt Cuizhi, who lets neighbors who want to eat the vegetables pick them from the vegetable garden themselves, free of charge.
When I think about it this way, when the season comes, it’s much more cost-effective to go directly to the village to buy it than to grow it myself.
Looking at Hu Qiongfang who was eating noodles with her head down, Jiang Tian sighed again:
If the situation continues like this, maybe her mother can become the first generation of wealthy people without her having to work hard herself.
