Speaking of eating, it seems that as a Xinyang person, I don't have any special dishes to show off. There is neither Dongpo meat in the south of the Yangtze River nor double yellow eggs as good as Gaoyou. The gourd wine in Border Town written by Shen Congwen is not comparable to ours. Goose in Gushi is famous, but unfortunately, my home is still a few hours away from there, and I have no luck to taste its authentic taste. As for the chain snacks such as Shaxian snacks from other provinces, Lamian Noodles in Lanzhou, and braised chicken, I have eaten a lot from south to north in recent years, but they have only a few flavors. In retrospect, I still miss the life of eating simple dishes in my hometown, and my spirit is swaying to the fireworks that are nurtured by life.
I travel all over the country and sometimes chat with many people. When I am asked where I come from, I say I am from Xinyang. They often say that you Xinyang people can eat, stir-fry a few side dishes with two glasses of wine for every meal, and enjoy life leisurely. After eating, I don't forget to make a pot of tea, sit in a cool chair and blow the evening breeze, watching the moon in the sky.
I quickly waved my hand and said no, the overall level of economic development in Xinyang is not high, the per capita income is more likely to hold the country back, and the material living standard is low. The working people are diligent all their lives and adhere to the simple style of thrift, which is not as happy as you said. As for sitting in a bamboo chair and blowing the evening breeze, it will save electricity for the country (in summer, the rural areas often have power outages, and the people don't want to hold the country back), and it is quite electricity-consuming to turn on the air conditioner. It's a waste not to drink the tea collected in the back of the mountain at home. Looking up at the moon is not a daze, it's a view of the moon. After all, the legend of the Goddess Chang'e flying to the moon, Wu Gang cutting laurel and Jade Rabbit smashing medicine has been circulating here for a long time. When did the moon begin to appear? The poetic philosophy of wine asking the sky is deeply hidden in the thoughts and bones of one working people.
Xinyang is a slow-paced city. Every morning when people get up and don't go to work, they will cook a pot of white rice porridge with a fried dish of peanuts or a salted duck egg, or put the leftovers left over from last night in the pot to solve it. People who go to work either order a bowl of white rice porridge in a snack bar, sometimes tofu brain or Hu spicy soup, and pass by with two fried dough sticks, vegetable cakes or sugar cakes. After eating, they wipe their mouths to settle accounts with the boss. In those years, Alipay and WeChat were not so popular, and some guests forgot to bring money when they went out in a hurry. With a wave of their hand, the boss went back to the stall and was busy.
At noon and at night, people always stir-fry a few side dishes and simmer a small pot of soup. It is also indispensable for guests to have wine at home. People in Xinyang, who drink white first and then beer, will take good care of you, and it will be all right if you are drunk. Rural houses are big, loose and bright, and there is always a place for you to rest when you are drunk.
When I came home the other day, it was raining lightly, and I was sitting in the car with misty rain. There were green cornfields on both sides of the road. Like most taxi drivers, the driver's master complained to me in his hometown dialect that it had rained for more than ten days in succession, and many things were lost.
South Lingnan in April and May, and it stopped in the Jianghuai area in June. The geography teacher taught it earlier, and it was about this time of the rainy season. Could it be that the seedlings planted by his family were washed away by the flood? I thought to myself.
the next day, just after I got up in the morning to brush my teeth, my little mother brought a basin of loach to my house for my grandmother to fry. She said that the heavy rain last night caused a lot of loaches to come out of the fields and run to the cages. This morning, when it was dawn to collect the cages, the results were not small.
I haven't eaten loach for a long time, so it's not easy to eat it when I'm outside. It's not that I don't have it outside, but it's hard to find. On the one hand, I'm laborious, and on the other hand, I'm not rich.
Sprinkle some salt into the basin to make the loach spit out the dirty things in his stomach, and grandma cleaned up the internal organs of the loach with a bamboo stick.
when cooking at noon, grandma found a handful of shallots, several short cucumbers and several loofahs from the garden behind the house. These side dishes were all grown by herself, and no pesticides were used. Grandma said that sometimes there would be bugs on the dishes, so she and grandpa moved chairs under the cowpea vine or loofah vine in the small garden to catch them by themselves. Some bugs were too stupid to be caught as soon as their heads were poked out, and some were as clever as children. Still can't escape the fate of being caught. The chickens in that neighborhood always like to wait outside the vegetable garden. All the bugs caught by grandma entered their bellies. A breeze came back from the bamboo forest, brushed on cucumbers, loofahs and tomatoes, and there was a faint fruity smell. When the chickens were full, they giggled and sang melodiously, as if they were sighing for a chicken's life.
Cook the oil pan until it is medium-cooked, add chopped ginger and fry it, pour a few drops of mature vinegar into it, and put the cleaned loach into the pan to stir-fry and dry. Our family prefers to eat dried loach, so we don't need to boil it, just put a little water to avoid frying it. When the loach is fried until golden and fragrant, we can add a proper amount of shallots, which will increase the aroma and secondly.
I washed the cucumber, cut it into pieces, washed a few picked mustard (a local coriander) and mixed it with cucumber pieces, patted a few cloves of garlic, dried Chili shells (these condiments are often hung at home in rural areas), added some sesame oil, Laoganma, or added sugar to eat sweet cold dishes, but I prefer salty and spicy, so I don't add sugar, only spicy. Just eat with rice, you can eat two small bowls of white rice and drink with wine, and you can drink one more cup of grain wine.
Drink a bowl of loofah soup after meals. The faint loofah soup is not greasy, and it can also be used to rinse your mouth and clean the foul air in your mouth. If you come, there will definitely be a pot of brewed tea here, mostly fried by yourself, which gives off the fragrance of bamboo branches. In summer, when you drink a cup of hot tea, the coolness will not come so soon. When the hot sweat dissipates, the coolness will gradually come. If there is a breeze, it will be great. Floating like a world of independence, feathering and becoming immortal.
In Xinyang, there is nothing to be painstakingly cooked. Every dish contains soul and spirit. Even if the food basket is empty, the hospitable host can easily conjure up a few side dishes for you. Although it is not exquisite, it has a local flavor in its simplicity. Pick a few tender Toona sinensis from the Toona sinensis tree at the door, wash them, and make Toona sinensis egg cakes with some earth eggs; Or choose the best piece from the dried bacon at home, dig out a few bamboo shoots from the bamboo forest behind the house and come back to stew; Even if the owner is too busy farming these two days, there is really no dish to entertain at home. It doesn't matter. There are so many neighbors, it doesn't matter much if she just borrows some vegetables from any one or picks a small basket in the garden next door.
Xinyang people also like to eat chilies, but they are not as vigorous and warm as those in Chongqing hot pot, which stimulates the nerves. Xinyang cuisine is less spicy and more pure, but can be accepted by more people. Xinyang people like sweets. When they were young, they often drank sweet wine soup, but its sweetness was not as sweet as that of mung bean cake and crisp fruit in Jiangnan, and the slight sweetness in leisure was more likely to make people salivate. There is no famous chain restaurant in Xinyang, but all kinds of snacks, such as stone jelly, Gushi goose nuggets, Regan Noodles, large intestine soup, chestnut, South Bay fish and Maojian tea, can make you have a snack in a small shop in a street corner or at the gathering place of people in the station market after a journey of landscape.
Many people in the city like to eat crayfish. I remember when we were young, there were plenty of crayfish in the fields. At that time, it was easy to catch a pot, peel off the shrimp shell and skin, and only eat a little shrimp tail. The pliers and head were not eaten-it was such a luxury. A pot of fresh crayfish turned into a plate of white shrimp tail meat, beaten with eggs and mixed well with it, and then sprinkled with some starch.
At that time, there were few snacks. It could be used as a dish during meals and as a snack after meals. In the past two years, I went to some food festivals and saw that some of their crayfish were cooked with spices and lying on the plate, and the soup was splashed everywhere. Some of the black marks on the back of the tail did not fade away, and even a blue intestine on the back was not removed. Some diners were full of interest. Perhaps this is also a new way to eat!
After dinner last night, I ran with my childhood playmates on the roadside. When it was getting dark, I watched a family's house smoke billowing from the kitchen, which quickly dispersed into the sky and melted between the blue sky and white clouds. Those old people who used to use firewood to make a fire all their lives stubbornly maintained their few habits in the era when new cookers were updated so violently.
I suddenly remembered the little poem I learned in primary school. Once I went to two or three miles, I went to four or five houses in Yancun. The pavilions are six or seven, and the flowers of eight, nine and ten are blooming. After a while, the smell of fried cucumber wafted from that kitchen. This cucumber was planted by our own family, I bet, because the taste of this dwarf cucumber is the same as that of my family. In rural areas, having some good seeds of vegetables, melons and fruits in one family means having them in the whole small village. Everyone shares them with each other, but takes nothing.
The small town with its back to the mountain has received countless gifts from the mountain for generations. Needless to say, plums, apricots, chestnuts and peaches in the garden behind the house, the seedlings (wild fruits) in the mountain lean out of the red and clear body in spring, and when you pick them, just put them in the mountain spring water not far away and put them in your mouth. The sour and sweet taste brings much comfort to the tired mountain people. Or wait until the wild carambola in autumn is ripe and go to Hulushi to pick carambola to eat; Sometimes we can see some pheasants running in the forest. Now it protects animals from catching, which was a rare delicacy in people's mouths in previous years. Summer is easy to be hot and dry, so it is quite effective to pick a few lotus roots and lotus seeds in the field, or pick a dwarf wax gourd from the vegetable field and come back to make soup.
Those Xinyang people who have lived under the remnant veins of Dabie Mountain all their lives, some of them are 7 or 8 years old, and some of them have fallen into the loess. Many of them have persevered from hardships and difficulties and come to the present.
In the end, they couldn't get used to steak and fried chicken, and they couldn't get used to coke and sprite. The local chicken at home was more to their taste. They didn't eat beef. In their time, they preferred to pour a pot of boiling hot water into an old teapot to watch the tea fluttering in it, and they preferred the spicy and choking taste brought by a mouthful of old wine. They ate the dishes they had been eating since childhood in the place where they were raised.
They are used to watching the rising and setting of the sun all their lives. They are used to sowing hope and looking for harvest in the soil all their lives. Maybe their children and grandchildren will walk out of the foot of the mountain and head for the city, but this is their native land.