I was standing in the kitchen, and I was hurt by the knife, shovel, ladle, bowl, chopsticks and spoon brought from the old kitchen. None of these things is not used by my mother.
I also feel bitter in my mouth and gray in my heart because my mother can't see the new kitchen and all the new things in the new kitchen.
My mother was still alive when I bought these four stoves with ovens for the new kitchen. I once boasted, "Mom, when we move into our new home, I will bake you a cake and roast chicken."
Look at the kitchen floor. I was also afraid that my mother's old legs and feet would be inconvenient, so I laid non-slip glazed tiles. However, my mother has never lived in this new home.
I haven't brought my mother to see it since I was assigned to this house. Always want to decorate, move home, let her come in when you are ready and give her a surprise. Later, she was admitted to the hospital and wanted to take her directly from the hospital to her new home when she wanted to leave the hospital.
But I was cheated by that decoration company.
Who let me always believe the story of the decoration company, thinking that I could move into a new home soon, and there were only a few clothes left in my hand, but who expected that my mother, who had a successful operation, would die suddenly, so that she couldn't even wear a decent suit on the road, let alone her favorite one.
Everything in the kitchen said to me mercilessly: now, it's finally time for you to deal with life alone.
I don't think I can start.
Looking out my mother's cookbook, every page looks like chopped green onion, and both sides are brown. From there, I can still smell my mother's oil, salt, sauce and vinegar, which is full of life.
I also think of my mother wearing a long and big old cowboy coat, a long apron and reading glasses, lying on the kitchen cabinet reading the menu.
These reading glasses really have a story.
On that occasion, my mother went to Xinjiekou Post Office and came home to find that she had lost her reading glasses!
In my mother's words, we were poor at that time, not to mention, when matching glasses, I insisted on the best lenses. I don't understand the rest. I only know that the eyes are very important organs for people. In the era of 1966, that pair of lenses with a price of 13 yuan was the best among the spectacle lenses. When she got home, she told me that she had lost her glasses. Losing such expensive glasses didn't make my mother feel guilty.
Reading glasses are not like short-sighted glasses, especially mother's reading glasses. At that time, the degree was not very deep, and they were just flowers, which most old people could use. Although the movement of imitating Lei Feng had been vigorously carried out at that time, my mother was unlucky and never met a living Lei Feng.
Every time I think about the torture that life has given my mother, I hate this life.
This pair of glasses can't be used for her eyes all the time. Sometimes she goes to the optical shop to get glasses, and she can't measure the degree at all. I asked the optometrist to at least calculate the degree. Barely matched a pair, purely decorative.
This decoration has been brought to her favorite person as a final memorial, and this pair of glasses that she has been worried about for a long time, together with its worn-out box, will be preserved until I leave. That is not only the memory of mother, but also the memory of our life at that time.
On my mother's menu, some items are marked with pencils or pen drawings, just like correcting students' homework.
The hooks drawn by those pencils slipped out of the pen, raised their long tails smartly, and swung straight to the northeast, with the calmness of their mothers who had been teachers all their lives.
The hooks of those pen-and-ink drawings, as if frightened, came out of the pen tip trembling and carefully shrank behind the purpose of the plate instead of in front of it, for fear of disturbing anyone. They are the footnotes of my mother's life, even if I brush them with water, burn them with fire or scrape them with a knife.
I don't understand why there is such a big difference between pencil hooks and pen and ink hooks.
Those dishes with hooks are the most common home-cooked dishes, such as sweet and sour pork slices, soft pork slices, vermicelli cold white meat, fried pork liver and braised tomato and beef. In the menu of fish and shrimp, the highest grade is just fresh fish with watercress, and the rest is either fried and steamed hairtail, or fragrant and fat hairtail. As for shrimps, crabs and turtles, I dare not even think about it. It's not that we dare not think, but that we have cut off this part of the line resolutely and decisively in our minds.
However, our family has changed from cutting a few pieces of cabbage and curing it with salt to cooking according to the recipe.
In fact, my mother has already made all the tomatoes, braised beef, chopped green onion cakes, home-cooked cakes, fried cakes, flower rolls, mung bean rice porridge and fried lotus seed eggs, but nothing else has been put into practice.
I went through my mother's recipes again and again and looked at the dishes with ticks that I was going to cook for us, but I don't know why I didn't make them in the end. Think like this, think like that, I'm afraid I'll keep thinking about it.
After all, I couldn't cook a dish according to my mother's recipe.
Generally speaking, it is easy to make ends meet. Semi-finished products such as bread, instant noodles, quick-frozen jiaozi and wonton are also very convenient. Then, I am looking forward to eating somewhere else, and I can cope with it for a few days after eating.
Sometimes I go to the vegetable market, but I can't find a way to start, so I go home with something that doesn't make any sense. When I get home, I have to eat vegetables, tofu and cucumbers every day in the face of meaningless things.
Cooking is done according to mom's method. Put your hand flat on the rice, water overflows your hand, or your fingertips touch the rice. When the water depth reaches the first knuckle, even if the amount of water is appropriate, good rice is different from machine rice, which drinks more water.
I bet my mother's pancakes can't catch up with the restaurant. When she was alive, we always talked about opening a "Mrs. Zhang's cake shop" to carry forward her mother's skills. Whenever we say this sentence, even if it is a good thing, the mother's face with a sad face has a rare light, and even the wrinkles on her face seem to be flattened a lot. For her, any good thing has no practical significance if it is not linked with our happiness, or even with temporary happiness.
And my mom's Zhajiang Noodles. It is not because her mother did it herself, and I don't know what tricks her mother used. The cakes and fried sauces she baked are unique. It's not that I haven't eaten the pancakes and noodles made by the master, but they don't taste like my mother.
Knowing in my heart the joy of eating my mother's pancakes and slag noodles, I will always follow my mother, but every time I eat pancakes and slag noodles, I can't help but think of the pancakes and slag noodles made by my mother and her mother.