Volume 1: Reborn in the 1980s, selling lunch boxes with my mother Chapter 83 Tea Eggs
Five buses came and went, but only two decided to stop at her house for dinner. However, after seeing the food at her house, most of the truck drivers stayed at her house for dinner.
Jiang Tian thought about it and guessed that these bus drivers must have familiar "cooperative merchants".
There's nothing we can do about it. Others give a lot, maybe even the meal isn't free. Don't drivers like to take passengers to other people's homes?
But she was not worried. The passenger flow on both sides of the provincial road would only increase in the future. As long as she could take root in this area, she would not have to worry about not having a share of the soup.
I sold nearly two hundred yuan worth of lunch boxes in one afternoon. After deducting the costs, I could make at least seventy or eighty yuan.
With such income on the first day of business, both uncles were happy for their sister.
Hu Qiongfang never thought that she could make so much money by setting up a stall selling lunch boxes at her !
It seems that Tiantian was right. Doing business does make more money than selling loaches and eels.
Loaches and eels can only be caught during a few months every year. Although it is a capital-free business, the income is unstable after all.
But it’s different when you set up a stall to sell boxed lunches. All year round, as long as there are cars running on the provincial road, there will be no shortage of people wanting to eat.
No matter how much you earn, as long as you can sell it, even if you only make a few dollars a day, it is much better than staying at home in the countryside and not making a penny.
However, when preparing lunch for the evening in the afternoon, Jiang Tian told her that she wanted to try making buns.
"Every bus has to travel at night, so I'm afraid we won't have time to stop and eat slowly. Mom, let's make some buns. We won't have time to eat when we're on the road, so it's convenient to buy a few buns and take them with us."
In fact, she also wanted to cook a pot of tea eggs, but the cost was too high. Eggs are not cheap now. If she couldn't sell them after cooking, wouldn't Ms. Hu be heartbroken?
Let’s make the buns first, and then make the tea eggs when we have more money.
Hu Qiongfang also felt that what her daughter said made sense.
She was also afraid that if the prepared food couldn't be sold, in this weather and without a refrigerator, she would get pregnant tomorrow.
It would be better to make buns. If you can’t finish them at night, you can take them home, put them in a basket, hang them in the well, take them out tomorrow morning, heat them up and have them as breakfast.
Hu Qiongfang is very strong and has great skill in kneading dough, so he is responsible for kneading the dough.
Jiang Tian is responsible for preparing the filling for the buns.
It was her first time making them, and she wasn’t sure how many she could sell , so she decided to make 200 to test the waters.
First go to the town’s vegetable market and buy a few pounds of hind leg meat, peel it and chop it into stuffing. Then cut a few pieces of tofu into pieces, blanch them in water, drain them and crush them, mix them evenly with the meat stuffing, add the prepared ginger and garlic water, and make a fresh meat and tofu bun.
Then take out a bowl of sour beans from home, wash and chop them, then heat the oil in a pan, put the chopped onion, ginger and garlic in, stir-fry until fragrant, then add a handful of crushed dried chilies, and finally pour in the sour beans.
The bun filling fried in this way is rich in oil and tastes much better than the sour bean buns without oil.
Of course, nowadays, ordinary people don’t fry the fillings in rapeseed oil before making sour bean buns.
That would be such a waste of fuel!
Hu Qiongfang was also horrified by her daughter's wasteful behavior.
Jiang Tian had to explain to her mother the meaning of "opening promotion" in later times.
In later generations, many supermarkets opened with slogans like “an egg for one cent” and “a pound of cabbage for one cent”, all of which were operating at a loss to attract customers - first they fooled the customers, and since they came, would they only buy the discounted eggs and cabbage?
Seeing that other things in a newly opened supermarket are quite cheap, nine out of ten customers will buy some. The cost lost on eggs and cabbage has to be earned back from customers in the end.
This is exactly what Jiang Tian was thinking.
Aren’t it only the truck drivers and passengers who need to eat? Don’t the locals also need to eat?
Just look at how popular Aunt Wang’s breakfast shop is.
Which housewife doesn't know how to make steamed buns and fried dough sticks these days? It's just that it's too troublesome to make them at home, and the weather is hot, so if you make too much, you can't finish it. If you make too little, it's not cost-effective, so you might as well buy them directly.
"Let's sell buns first and attract people to our store. When everyone is used to coming to our store to buy buns at night, then our noodle shop can also be opened."
Hu Qiongfang listened for a long time and finally understood what her daughter meant.
"Then our store will still sell steamed buns, but we will also have noodles. Some people who are tired of eating steamed buns may be willing to change their taste when they see that we have noodles in our store?"
Jiang Tian gave her mother a thumbs up and said, "Mom, I think you are born to be a businessman. It's a waste of your talent to farm in the village."
Hu Qiongfang poked her daughter in annoyance, but she felt happy in her heart.
When she was a daughter-in-law in the Jiang family, both her mother-in-law and her husband always felt that she was not good at anything. She had no choice but to do the hard and tiring work that she was good at.
These tasks don't require much brainpower and although they are hard work, Hu Qiongfang feels that she is not eating for free in this family when she can get a word of affirmation from her mother-in-law and husband.
Now that I think about it, it’s not that she can’t do these things, but that her mother-in-law and husband don’t want her to do them…
Is it because no one else wants to do the dirty and tiring work at home, so they scold her for being stupid and not being able to cook all day long and make her work in the fields?
Thinking of this, Hu Qiongfang gradually felt uncomfortable.
She was unwilling to admit that she was blind and chose the wrong person when she was young, but the facts told her every day that after losing her husband and mother-in-law, her life was getting better and better.
…
The workers who were building the house at home also ate buns in the evening. Hu Qiongfang knew that building a house was hard work and was afraid of neglecting them, so in addition to steaming buns, she also made a big pot of tomato and egg soup and cooked a pot of mung bean porridge.
Although they are not expensive meat dishes, but on such a hot day, after moving bricks at the construction site all day, eating some light and heat-reducing mung bean porridge and buns is much more comfortable than eating greasy stir-fried dishes.
The contractor who was introduced by Han Dajun to build their house was nicknamed "Brother Wu". He was tall and strong, and he would eat ten big buns in one meal!
The buns made by Hu Qiongfang just suited his appetite. Brother Wu ate seven or eight of them in one breath, then gulped down a large bowl of mung bean porridge. He wiped his mouth and gave Hu Qiongfang a thumbs up.
"Big sister, your cooking skills are amazing!"
"Will you still make buns tomorrow? Leave me twenty, no, thirty stuffed with pork and tofu, and ten stuffed with sour beans. I'll take them back for my family to try."
Hu Qiongfang was startled, but then she couldn't help laughing: "Then your family is very prosperous."
They eat forty buns in one meal, so there must be at least six or seven people in the family, right?
Brother Wu scratched his head.
I really feel embarrassed to say it, he is the only one in his family, plus two bald boys.
There's nothing you can do about it. The people in the Wu family are born with big appetites.
Not to mention a grown man like him, even his sister who married the owner of a brick factory can show off a whole pig's trotter in one meal!
