Having learned from past mistakes, Jiang Xiaoman absolutely refused to eat leftovers this year, and only cooked the dishes she would eat from New Year's Eve to New Year's Day.
There's no way around it; their custom is that you can't use knives or scissors on the first day of the Lunar New Year, meaning you can't use a knife to cook.
First are the pig's head, carp, and whole chicken used for ancestral worship.
The whole pig's head has been marinated and hung under the eaves to air dry. Take down the pig's head, first burn off the hair with fire, and then wash it clean for later use.
Cut a few small bamboo stalks and arrange them in a cross shape under the large wood-fired pot. Place the pig's head steadily on top of these stalks, fill the pot with water until it is mostly submerged, and then you can start cooking.
To save firewood, Jiang Xiaoman also placed a steamer on top, lined it with two layers of cloth, and steamed a basket of steamed pork with rice flour.
You can make a lot of this steamed pork with rice flour at once, put it in a big bowl, and heat up two plates when guests come. The rice flour in the steamed pork gets softer and softer the longer it's steamed, and the fatty and lean pork belly is also very delicious.
The carp needs to be marinated first, then coated with batter and egg, and fried until golden brown on both sides. After arranging it on a plate, stir-fry tomatoes separately to make a sweet and sour sauce, which looks especially good when poured over the carp!
The old way locals used to do it was simply to braise the whole carp and then put it on a plate.
But Jiang Xiaoman disliked that it didn't look good, and besides, if the braised carp wasn't eaten after cooking, and was reheated for the second meal, the meat would become tough and fall apart easily, which wouldn't taste good. So he searched for a recipe for sweet and sour carp on his phone.
The carp prepared this way looks better on the plate, and after the ancestral worship on New Year's Eve, it can be eaten the next day by simply reheating it in a double boiler.
Roasting a whole chicken requires more skill from the chef.
However, this year Jiang Xiaoman changed his approach. He used the air fryer that the brand sent him for trial to make a golden-brown, oily roasted chicken!
Jiang Youliang couldn't resist taking out his phone and snapping two photos of the chicken.
The Jiang family's ancestral altar this year was truly exceptionally dignified!
The ancestors live in newly built Western-style houses, eat roasted chicken made in an air fryer, as well as sweet and sour carp and cooked pig's head. Wouldn't they bless his family's business to prosper in the coming year?
...
Before we knew it, it was New Year's Eve. Their custom is to eat sweet rice wine dumplings on the morning of New Year's Eve, which symbolizes a happy and harmonious family reunion.
Jiang Youliang may not be a great cook, but he's an expert at brewing wine! This year, his family is well-off, so he bought 200 jin of glutinous rice early in the morning and made three large barrels of sweet rice wine!
The steamed glutinous rice and sweet wine yeast are mixed evenly and placed in a large bucket with a hole made in the center. Then, it's time to wait for the glutinous rice to ferment. The fermented rice wine is not as clear as baijiu (Chinese white liquor); it's a bit cloudy and looks similar to rice water. This fermented rice wine is what's served to guests during the Chinese New Year.
I made the sesame-filled glutinous rice balls last night and froze them in the refrigerator. This morning, all I had to do was take a bowl, scoop out a few spoonfuls of sweet fermented rice, cook the rice balls first, and once they floated to the surface, I scooped out some water, poured in the sweet fermented rice, and brought it to a boil.
Jiang Xiaoman doesn't like adding sugar to his sweet fermented rice balls, but he prepared brown sugar separately for his father and Jiang Baichuan.
Right after they finished breakfast, his and Jiang Baichuan's phones started ringing non-stop.
In the past, people would exchange New Year's greetings right on New Year's Eve, but in recent years they have become more savvy and have started to send greetings at different times.
Many people sent New Year's greetings to Jiang Baichuan!
He has been teaching at Langshan Village Primary School for many years. It can be said that many of the children in the Langshan area who are the same age as Jiang Xiaoman were Jiang Baichuan's students.
Now that their own children have started school, Jiang Baichuan remains their children's teacher, and their relationship is very close!
If Jiang Baichuan hadn't refused to accept anything during holidays, it's no exaggeration to say that the food and drinks parents sent him during those holidays would have been enough for Principal Baichuan to open a small shop.
Unable to send gifts, the parents could only express their gratitude and best wishes to Principal Baichuan via WeChat.
Jiang Baichuan replied to each message one by one while holding his phone.
Jiang Xiaoman also held his phone, carefully editing his New Year's greetings. So many people had helped him this year that he couldn't visit them all in person, so he had to send his New Year's wishes in a timely manner.
Jiang Youliang looked around and saw that his cousin and son were both immersed in the new era of New Year's greetings. He suddenly felt it was rather boring, so he simply put on his rain boots, swept the snow off the door, and piled up three popular Bing Dwen Dwen figures outside the yard!
Believe it or not, Jiang Youliang actually has a real talent for building snowmen!
After stacking up the knock-off Bing Dwen Dwen, I even broke off a few bamboo leaves and stuffed them into the smallest Bing Dwen Dwen's arms. Looking at it this way, it looks like two Bing Dwen Dwen and their greedy little cub.
Jiang Xiaoman was caught off guard when she realized that her father had put up such a big project at the entrance. However, why did the snowman sculpture of "a family of three" look so much like the three of them?
Jiang Xiaoman also captured this scene, and when fans of Bing Dwen Dwen saw the three snowmen—no, Bing Dwen Dwen's fans—they almost died laughing.
After spending most of the day, they finally got the essential "sending New Year's greetings online" part done. Both uncle and nephew were exhausted.
Jiang Xiaoman ran to the storage room, carried a basket of tangerines she had bought before the New Year onto the kang (a heated brick bed), and the family of three watched TV while showing off the tangerines.
Netizens are right, tangerines do have a certain magical quality.
Peeling them is easier than with grapefruit or oranges; you can eat them one after another and just can't stop.
Before we knew it, half of the basket of tangerines was gone...
"We can't eat any more, let's put it away! We need to save room for the New Year's Eve dinner."
Jiang Baichuan put away the tangerines, washed his hands in the sink next to the bar, put on an old coat, and prepared the New Year's Eve dinner with Jiang Xiaoman.
Jiang Youliang was in charge of sitting under the stove and tending the fire, while Jiang Baichuan assisted him in preparing the ingredients. Jiang Xiaoman wielded a cleaver and a large ladle, with a tripod set up next to him, cooking and filming at the same time.
"We're starting to prepare for the New Year's Eve dinner! I don't know how many dishes you make for the New Year, but here in Langshan, no matter how poor a family is, we still have to prepare ten dishes for New Year's Eve."
“I remember when my family was poor, sometimes we couldn’t afford to eat all the noodles, so we would stir-fry a pot of noodles and fill several bowls with them, plus vegetables, to make a total of ten bowls.”
"But things are better now. Whether we go out to work or farm at home, no matter how difficult things are at home, we can still afford ten bowls of dishes on New Year's Eve! Let me show you the ingredients we've prepared for this year's New Year's Eve dinner!"
As she spoke, Jiang Xiaoman picked up a tripod and took pictures of all the ingredients she had prepared for the New Year.
The whole pig's head, roast chicken, and sweet and sour carp, which have already been cooked and plated, along with beef, mutton, pork, and carp for the New Year's Eve dinner, as well as soaked wild mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, wood ear mushrooms, and white fungus, various fresh vegetables, and frozen shrimp and ribbonfish... Jiang Xiaoman's original design for the cutting board was already the largest in the village, but it still almost couldn't fit everything!
"Let me read you the menu for my family's New Year's Eve dinner again~" Jiang Xiaoman coughed and took a piece of written notepaper from the refrigerator door—
"Stewed beef brisket with potatoes, stewed mutton with carrots, braised carp, steamed pork with rice flour, braised pork with shiitake mushrooms, braised chicken with wild mushrooms, braised prawns, braised ribbonfish with shredded radish, and two vegetarian dishes, one spinach in broth and the other braised pork belly with cabbage."
Goodness! These are all hearty dishes!
Fortunately, when Jiang Xiaoman's family built their new kitchen, they had taken the issue of smoke extraction into account. They specially installed a high-powered exhaust fan on the wall next to the chimney, and a range hood was also installed on the gas stove for cooking.
So even if three pots are cooking rice and vegetables in the kitchen at the same time, it's not like the old houses where the kitchen is filled with cooking fumes.
Jiang Xiaoman cooks very cleanly and efficiently, and can manage three pots at the same time—first stir-frying the potato and beef stew, then adding water to stew it, and then starting to cook wild mushroom and chicken stew in another pot next to it, while the stew is also being cooked in another pot, and then frying the shrimp and ribbonfish on the gas stove, both of which need to be fried first to taste good.
Jiang Baichuan watched from the side and couldn't help but laugh. He said that if he had known Jiang Xiaoman was so talented in cooking, he would have simply skipped college and gone to New Oriental for two years of training. After that, he could have found a good master to mentor him for a few years, and he might be a master chef earning 20,000 yuan a month by now.
Although he works in the education field, Jiang Baichuan himself does not have any obsession with higher education.
He forced the children in the mountains to study, not necessarily so that they could all go to university, but because he believed that only by experiencing a complete compulsory education could a naive child form correct values and a sense of right and wrong, and at the very least know what should and should not be done.
He also remembered a news story from a few years ago about a man who was a habitual thief of electric bicycles. The police arrested him and asked him why he kept stealing electric bicycles despite being warned.
Surprisingly, the man said that he didn't know anything and didn't want to work in a factory, so he could only make a living by stealing electric bicycles.
This somewhat absurd news made netizens laugh out loud, but Jiang Baichuan only felt infinite sorrow after reading it.
This man, despite appearing to be an adult, completely lacks a proper sense of right and wrong and a moral compass. In fact, he views "stealing electric bicycles" and "working in a factory" as both ways to make a living, which is quite alarming.
Jiang Baichuan found it hard to imagine how many more men like him, who steal electric bikes, would emerge in Langshan in the future if they hadn't received a complete compulsory education...
Thinking of this, Jiang Baichuan glanced at his nephew with satisfaction.
He also knew that relying solely on his home visits to force the child to attend school was not a long-term solution.
After all, he can manage primary school, but he can't manage junior high school.
As long as Langshan remains as poor and isolated as it is now, countless children will continue to be unable to attend junior high school, or will drop out of school to get married, or will be sent by their parents to work as "apprentices" to earn money for their families.
Therefore, Xiaoman's approach was correct.
Only by fundamentally improving the livelihoods of the people of Langshan, ensuring that every household can afford their children's tuition fees, can more students be encouraged to return to school...
Thinking of the New Year's greetings he had just received, Jiang Baichuan suddenly felt a surge of strength again!
Just now, several of his former students messaged him on WeChat, saying they were wrong. They shouldn't have listened to him and dropped out of school before finishing junior high to work. They discovered that people who graduated from high school or even junior college, or even those working in factories, were promoted much faster than them!
These students got married early, and now their children are also studying at Langshan Primary School.
They messaged Jiang Baichuan, all expressing the same sentiment: Please, Principal Jiang, make sure your children study hard! Even if it means working overtime every night, we'll support their children's education and help them get into university! Even a vocational college would be good enough if they didn't get into a four-year university…
That's why they have the confidence to say such things once they've found a way to make money!
Jiang Baichuan thought that if the villagers could make money by beekeeping with Jiang Xiaoman and his group, perhaps Langshan would produce a few more "Jiang Xiaomans" in the future?
Chapter 137
Jiang Baichuan hadn't had such a lively and sumptuous New Year's Eve dinner in many years.
His old family house has been uninhabited for many years. In previous years, he lived alone at the school and would just cook a couple of dishes for himself during the Spring Festival.
But this year is different. Jiang Xiaoman is too much of a troublemaker. Not only did he cook a huge table of dishes, but he also prepared three kinds of drinks.
Baijiu (Chinese liquor), red wine, and homemade rice wine.
Worried that the cooked dishes would get cold, Jiang Xiaoman bought several alcohol stoves in advance and put some stews on them.
Several large and small alcohol stoves and charcoal stoves were on the table, making the room warm and cozy.
The food was ready, and Jiang Xiaoman urged his dad and uncle to go back to their room and change into new clothes. He also went back to his room, took a shower, and changed into the new clothes he had bought online in advance.
All three of them were wearing the same bright red down jackets, and standing together they looked like three walking red envelopes!
There was no way around it; when buying clothes online, Jiang Xiaoman's old habit of being stingy and trying to reach the minimum order amount kicked in again.
Upon seeing the store's page displaying "20% off for two items, 30% off for three items," he didn't hesitate to place an order for three items!
Besides down jackets, down pants are also very popular this year. Considering the cold in the mountains, Jiang Xiaoman bought eight pairs of down pants online at once!
The three of them each took two, and gave the remaining two to Grandma Jiang.
Beneath his black down-filled trousers were waterproof, non-slip rubber-soled shoes for the elderly... Sigh! His uncle and his father have also reached the age where they should be wearing shoes for the elderly!
Jiang Xiaoman, who feels she is still young, bought herself non-slip, fleece-lined men's hiking boots.
After changing their clothes, Jiang Youliang led the two of them to worship their ancestors together—this is where the advantage of Jiang Baichuan coming to his cousin's house for the New Year really comes into play, since both sides share the same ancestor, so there's no need for separate ancestral worship ceremonies.
When decorating, for aesthetic reasons, Jiang Xiaoman did not buy the bulky and space-consuming central cabinet commonly found in rural homes. Since his family only holds ancestral worship once a year, he simply made a display table out of plywood. It is usually placed next to the small living room to display some green plants and ornaments. When it is time to worship ancestors, it can be moved out to place the offerings.
Jiang Youliang initially thought his son's actions were utterly rebellious, but after discovering that the altar actually had three tiers and could hold more offerings, he was completely won over.
On the north-facing table, the top layer now displays a large pig's head, roast chicken, braised carp, and a pair of incense candles. The second layer contains five-colored rice cakes, New Year cakes, and candies. The third layer contains apples, oranges, and two large pomelos.
Jiang Xiaoman turned off the camera and accompanied her father and uncle through the worship ceremony with a devout expression.
Then comes the most beloved part of the year: the New Year's Eve dinner.
Jiang Youliang took a string of firecrackers outside and hung them on the persimmon tree in the yard. After setting them off with a series of crackling sounds, he immediately came back in and closed the gate.
This is also a local custom in Langshan. It is said that setting off firecrackers can drive away the Nian monster. After setting them off, take advantage of the Nian monster's inattention and quickly close the door so that the whole family can have a peaceful year ahead.