First, My Sweetie sauerkraut
The vegetable market is really prosperous. Southern cuisine, which the northeast people have never eaten and rarely eat, is now on the market almost together with southern cuisine, which is more, better and timely. Living in the north and eating southern food, I think northerners have more luck than southerners. When it comes to northern cuisine, it has greatly broken through the original model in time and variety, and many original home-cooked dishes have also stepped onto the public counter, which is authentic and cheap. As a result, northerners eat northern dishes, especially when they choose, choose and choose, and they are dumbfounded and eat better. One of them is kimchi from My Sweetie.
Housewives in the north, even lazy and stupid like me, will pickle sauerkraut. Because in those years, the family-made vegetable market was not for sale. If you don't pickle sauerkraut at home, you will roll with cabbage, radish and potato seeds all day in the long winter. Are you tired of it? Tired of it.
Chinese cabbage is the main pickle in Northeast China. I have also seen my mother cut two radishes in half and stuffed them into a sour cabbage jar. After pickling, she fried sour radish strips, which were also delicious. It is said that some people also pickled potatoes, which I have never eaten.
I learned to pickle sauerkraut when I laid hands on my mother. In late autumn, after the Chinese cabbage is dried for a few days (don't be too full to make sauerkraut), peel off the outermost old gang (leftovers can be eaten, otherwise the tank capacity will be wasted), boil a large pot of boiling water, blanch it one by one in the boiling water, take it out and cool it thoroughly, and then stack it into a clean vat layer by layer (this vat usually only makes sauerkraut tanks once a year, under normal circumstances). Code a layer of vegetables and sprinkle a handful of large grains of salt for preservation and flavor improvement. In order to make the yard more realistic, several yards were covered with sacks and an adult stepped on them. The yard is two or three stories above the tank mouth, and it is pressed on a special stone (this stone should be flat and of proper weight, so it can't be found casually, so it has been carefully kept for many years). Clean cold water is poured in a day or two, and some people pay attention to using cold boiled water. The water level is half a foot away from the tank mouth (when the vegetables are pressed down, the water comes up, but the vegetables are never in the water). This kind of dish jar is usually placed in the outer room of the kitchen, which is cooler. Too hot is easy to rot, too fast and too sour is not good to eat. A month and a half, it's ready, and it's characterized by translucent and light yellow pickles, which can be eaten. Delicious sauerkraut is crisp and raw in My Sweetie, and the acidity is just right.
How good pickled sauerkraut is and how it tastes depends on personal experience. Later, there was "sauerkraut fresh", a biochemical preparation that can promote acid preservation, which increased the talent of Mi Shou. There is a popular saying that pickled sauerkraut is often delicious for people who are lazy at home. I believe. Because my pickled sauerkraut is never rotten and delicious, my diligent and agile mother-in-law came to pickle it for me, and it was rotten.
The marketing of sauerkraut should be synchronized with the reform and opening up. First of all, vendors make small products and sell them in the morning and evening markets. This kind of sauerkraut makes people uneasy to eat. Because the vegetables and water in sauerkraut are clean or not, it depends on the conscience of the vegetable owner. Like the stinky tofu made from sewage that broke out a few years ago, the uninformed people said it was delicious, which was not reflected in the taste of sauerkraut itself. Therefore, in the market, I hesitate to pick and choose, or I can rest assured. Later, there was the brand of sauerkraut. The earliest and most famous brand was the Cui Hua brand named after Xue Cun's sentence "Cui Hua, sauerkraut serves". Soon, there will be many brands, such as cabbage, kohlrabi, whole vegetables and shredded vegetables. Small package, a pack of one meal, very convenient. It's just that the quality of some brand dishes is unstable. Sometimes it's delicious, sometimes it's not. It's all about moving. But I don't pickle sauerkraut myself anymore. I want to eat it and buy a bag. Nine times out of ten, I am satisfied.
Really ignored the time to market of the farm's own sauerkraut. When I cut a bag of organic sauerkraut into the pot, I looked back at the origin of the bag and exclaimed: Hey, it's from the agricultural reclamation! Since then, I have specially bought this kind of sauerkraut. Although the set meal is too big, one bag can be eaten twice, and the price is slightly higher, you must buy it because you can rest assured.
An old cat slept on the kang and was handed down from generation to generation. Northeasters naturally don't need to learn how to eat sauerkraut. It has hundreds of years of experience, and the basic rules remain unchanged in different times. This is the characteristic of sauerkraut. I have seen a demobilized officer who developed the Great Northern Wilderness. After returning to the south, he recalled the scene of eating sauerkraut in the Great Northern Wilderness, which was very nostalgic. It is not easy. Many southerners can't get used to sauerkraut in the northeast, so they want to eat it. He must have stayed in the Great Northern Wilderness for a long time. He said, sauerkraut can't be steamed, fried, stewed and fried, especially in jiaozi. Also attached is a picture. You have learned from eating a lot. Sauerkraut, as a hot pot dish, has always been a very popular way to eat. With beef and mutton, it not only relieves boredom but also adds freshness. Zhang Kangkang wrote a short article saying that a friend of Harbin invited her to eat hot pot. When cutting sauerkraut, she is very particular. She cut a piece of sauerkraut into two slices, thin, and cut the shredded vegetables very thin. In fact, when cooking stews, people who are keen on eating should also help sauerkraut lose weight. Sauerkraut, whether stewed or fried, is shredded horizontally, unlike cabbage, which is sliced when fried and sliced horizontally when stewed.
Sauerkraut The difference between the poor and the rich is meat. Sauerkraut likes oil, which means that it is delicious to make sauerkraut with big oil and big meat. Now the restaurant has several famous sauerkraut, fried sauerkraut powder, stewed sauerkraut with big bones and Sichuan white meat, all of which are meaty and oily. The traditional way of eating is to cook pig-killing dishes and add sauerkraut to the cooked broth. When I was a child, my family was poor. My mother often cooks potatoes with pickles. First, I put sauerkraut in a pot and cook potatoes with thin strips. When I cook like this, potatoes always have a hard shell outside and a hard inside, which is very personal. In order to add flavor to the dishes, grandma burned two dried red peppers with charcoal, cut them with scissors and sprinkled them into the soup. Sour and delicious, so dishes with little oil and no meat have become our enemies. Drinking porridge at night, pickled cabbage heart is one of the pickles.
The biggest difference between eating sauerkraut is that it used to be eaten only in winter, but now it is eaten all year round. You can eat it every day, but it is sold on the counter every day. And eating sauerkraut in spring, summer and autumn, a table of all kinds of vegetables, can really add color, taste and nutrition. However, I prefer to eat sauerkraut in winter. When the weather is cold, the quality will be better, and it is traditional. That is the authentic northeast food culture.
Second, wet frozen vegetables.
Growing up in the north, you can not only enjoy the beauty of ice and snow, but also taste delicious frozen vegetables. Located in the ice and snow market, fresh vegetables are covered with thick winter clothes, and frozen vegetables are stacked or packed on the stage. In the indoor market, frozen vegetables are basically packed in small packages and placed in freezers, which interact with frozen meat and frozen seafood.
The current varieties of frozen vegetables make northerners feel dizzy, which was suddenly felt during the Spring Festival. Quick-frozen beans, eggplant, tomatoes, pumpkins, garlic, potatoes, one bag, just one plate, hardcover semi-finished products. It's convenient to freeze and cut the package, or stir-fry, or stew, or steam, especially because it tastes fresh.
Frozen vegetables used to be a helpless choice for northerners, and also a unique vegetable for northerners in winter. It is too cold in winter in the north, and the natural temperature during the day is below zero 10 degrees and 20 degrees. Anything with moisture freezes hard and helps the land. In the house, the bungalows in those days were all heated by stoves and kang. There is not enough heat in the corner window sill. The frost is old and thick all winter, and even the water tank is frozen with only a small "spring eye" in the middle. Fresh vegetables are prepared in autumn. Cabbage, radish and potato, which can be stored for a long time, are all stored in the vegetable cellar. If the vegetable cellar is not handled well, or there is no vegetable cellar, potatoes and radishes will be put at home, cabbage will be pickled into sauerkraut, and the rest will be frozen and eaten.
At that time, ordinary people had not heard of refrigerators and freezers, and the frozen vegetables of one household were naturally frozen. When I was a child, my family would cook some frozen vegetables every year. The raw materials are vegetables eliminated after making sauerkraut and fresh-keeping vegetables. Frozen vegetables are mainly Chinese cabbage, and radish and potatoes taste terrible after natural freezing. Frozen vegetables are not left outside to be frozen by cold air at the beginning, because the temperature fluctuates greatly in the first few days of winter, below zero at night and above zero during the day, so vegetables can't be eaten if they are frozen. Wait until the temperature during the day is stable at MINUS several degrees, and then sort out the fresh vegetables that have been piled up in the corner or outside the house and put them in the right place. Usually frozen in a frozen shed or in a shady corner of the yard. Take one when eating, cut it into large pieces when freezing, cook it in a boiling pot, and then cook it with a knife.
There are two ways to eat frozen cabbage in my family. The first is to cook soup, which is made of millet soup. (First, boil millet porridge in wide water. When it is half cooked, take the rice out and put it in a basin, then steam it on water. The millet cooked in this way tastes soft and delicious. This soup is thick but not sticky. The mixed flavor of rice, vegetables and sometimes salty (stew with salt quickly) is delicious. The second is to use egg sauce, onion and garlic to make pickles. This kind of coarse grains also fills our stomachs. As far as I can remember, the best way to eat frozen cabbage is to cook and kill pork dishes. In those years, although my family lived in the county, my mother and grandmother always created conditions to raise a pig every year, in order to eat more meat during the New Year in poor days. Killing pigs always asks neighbors and friends for help and treats them with a pot of pork and blood sausage. After the meat is cooked, the soup in the pot is oily and thick, and then frozen cabbage and frozen tofu are added to make a pot-stewed dish. Then, put the pot in place, take it outside for freezing, and then put it in a large container for freezing preservation. I brought back a bunch of dishes when I was eating in the New Year, which was delicious without any flavor enhancement of monosodium glutamate.
Nowadays, frozen vegetables are not traditional frozen vegetables, but completely different in quality and freezing methods, especially quick freezing, which is actually the product of industrialization. This understanding is caused by frozen potato pieces. I was taken aback when I first saw frozen potato chips. In my mind, frozen potatoes are not delicious. Make a question into a dish. It tastes like fresh potatoes. It is delicious. So, I checked the information, and it said that quick freezing is a unique freezing process, which quickly reduces the temperature of food to far below the freezing point of water. Because of the fast cooling speed, water can't freeze at zero, and it becomes over-frozen. This structure has little damage to cells, thus maintaining the state of food before freezing. This is why quick-frozen vegetables taste fresh.
Living in a building for a long time means that there is no garden, no vegetable cellar, no personal place outside the house, and you can't make your own frozen vegetables. It is a disadvantage to freeze the north balcony in winter. When I think of frozen vegetables, I turn them into welfare. I bought some cabbage and ate it, so I put it on the north balcony and made some frozen tofu. I was greedy that day, so I chose pork with five flowers and three layers to make a stew.
Eating frozen vegetables in front of us and recalling the past when we cooked and ate frozen vegetables is like reviewing history. There are both long-standing humanistic homesickness and feelings for social development. In the mouth, in the heart, the taste is strong and deeply felt.
Third, correct dried vegetables.
Cousin claims to be a master cook, and his cowhide is very loud. He said that his cooking would make me unable to find my home. The words on the dining table are the happiness on the dining table. Although I don't believe it can make a good dish that I can't find a home, the stewed dry dish is really delicious.
Dried vegetables should be familiar to northerners. In the era when there are no industrial products to keep seasonal vegetables fresh and no modern agricultural technology to make four-season lettuce, it is difficult to have a long-term vegetable season in cold areas, and there are still piles of vegetables in the garden. On the one hand, the vegetable season is short and the vegetable season is long. On the other hand, vegetables in the vegetable season are concentrated and difficult to "digest". So, I tried to dry the extra vegetables to make up for the short ones and ensure that there are vegetables all year round.
Not only do people who grow vegetables in the garden dry vegetables, but also people who buy food and eat will buy some fresh vegetables to dry vegetables in the autumn when the vegetables are the most prosperous and the prices are the lowest. When I was a child, my family belonged to a family with both situations. I planted some, bought some, and produced dried vegetables every year.
Dried vegetables are non-berry vegetables in fruits and vegetables, such as zucchini, pumpkin, eggplant and beans. When mom and grandma are cooking dried vegetables for winter, we children are also happy to make trouble, because some practices of dried vegetables are like games, which are very fun. For example, zucchini, cut from the middle, and then take out the pulp and seeds to make two spoonfuls. Some people put the ladle directly on the stake of the stick in winter to dry and cut it into pieces. My family didn't. Grandma used a knife to cut along the edge of the ladle continuously, and a ladle finally became a long belt, flat or hung to dry. Pumpkins are the same. Put it away when it's dry, just like winding a rope into a handle and putting it in a cloth bag. Change knives and stew potatoes in winter. For example, some people steam eggplant and spread it out to dry. My family cut it with a knife. That kind of knife work requires a lot of skill. Then I lifted the eggplant and shook it, and the eggplant strips hung down like tassels. Two eggplant stalks are crossed into a group and hung to dry. For example, there are several drying methods for beans, such as steaming, shredding and cutting into strips. Such as potatoes, steamed, sliced and dried. Return the red pepper, wear it in a string and hang it under the eaves. If you don't even put it, you just hang it. When eating, catch a few. What else can I do? After a long time, my memory is blurred.
People with busy lives are also a little busy in the autumn drying season. Housewives are busy eating three meals a day, feeding pigs and dogs, and then cutting vegetables and drying them. At this time, purple-black, light green and dark yellow vegetables, such as ribbons, shreds and slices, are hung everywhere on woodpiles, sticks, ropes being pulled up now and shelves being set up, which has become a seasonal landscape at home.
In Lu Xun's novel Hometown, an old Runtu came to visit "Master Lu" and brought a pack of vegetables as a gift. Luzhen seems to have a tradition of drying vegetables.
There is no shortage of fresh vegetables in winter now, and dried vegetables are still very popular. Only one dish in the restaurant is stewed dried vegetables, which turns tradition and commonness into fashion. It is said that the most famous one is stewed potato chips with eggplant pants. I really want to know that eggplant pants are the structure in which the fruit is wrapped on the fruit root after flowering. How many eggplant pants can dry to stew a big bowl? Here, too, things are rare.
The way to eat dried vegetables, because they are dry and tough, needs to be soaked or boiled first, and then steamed, fried, stewed or mixed with knives. Dried vegetables generally have a different taste from the original fresh vegetables, especially the crispness and softness when fresh, and have a special flavor.
Nowadays, dried vegetables are very popular products in vegetable shops. In the ranks of dried mushrooms and fungus, there are small packages of dried bean curd, dried eggplant slices and pumpkin slices. It is already a processed product of the factory, or it is bought from one shop and sold in the store. Buying a bag, cooking it before cooking it, is what our lazy wife praises most.
Nowadays, dried vegetables, like other vegetables, have many kinds and good quality. It is an aspect of economic prosperity that northerners feel in this era.