I'm not bragging. I began to eat jiaozi soon after I was born, every year, month after month, often for 60 years. My mother's old home is in Northeast Heilongjiang. How lucky it is to live in the south and have a mother in the northeast. When winter arrived, I followed my mother to the vegetable market, and the vegetable farmers had to pick back at least 200 kilograms of yellow bud white to pickle the northeast sauerkraut.

Scald the Chinese cabbage with boiling water and put it layer by layer in pots of different sizes. I use tap water at home. Brother should pick clear well water from the outside and pour it into the jar, and then press it with a big stone to prevent the Chinese cabbage from being dishonest when fermenting. Slowly, the vat began to bubble, and when there was a thin white film on the water, the sauerkraut was almost ready to eat.

Every ten days and a half, jiaozi is served with pickles. With a large population, you have to buy at least four or five pounds of meat with two large pickles to cook a meal. Mother is busy picking green onions with flour, Aunt Zhang (nanny) is chopping meat, and the dumpling stuffing is put in the washbasin. Adults are busy packing jiaozi, and I am busy making trouble. Fun dough is a toy that I remembered deeply when I was a child.

Chinese cabbage is best pickled until it is crisp and sour. Never squeeze all the sauerkraut juice dry, let alone the shallots in the south. It must taste authentic with northern shallots. Mixing dough is also a technical activity, and it takes four or five hours to wake up in winter to be full of energy. Sauerkraut is an oil absorber, so the ratio of fat meat to lean meat should be 50/50, and the stuffing should be oiled, so that you can eat jiaozi, which is sour, crisp and refreshing.

Affected by the greenhouse effect, the weather in the south will be "warm in winter and cool in summer", and the sauerkraut made by ourselves will often be messed up. There are no guns and cannons. The enemy built them for us. Thanks to Ma Yun, a smelly boy, who saved us from heavy physical labor and made it easy for us to buy sauerkraut online in Northeast China. I received boxes of sauerkraut from Heilongjiang, and the small bag contained shredded sauerkraut, which would remind me of the warm scene of my mother pickling sauerkraut.

Although my parents are gone, our big brother and big sister still celebrate the New Year together. As the bell of CCTV Spring Festival Evening rang, plates of pickled jiaozi were served to complete the 70-year-old ceremony of "making friends" and eating jiaozi. There are dozens of fillings in jiaozi, but my family insists on jiaozi with sauerkraut, because jiaozi with sauerkraut has childhood memories. He ate jiaozi with his parents decades ago, especially the taste of his mother will never be erased.