In the past few years, there are not many moments when I miss my hometown. Most of the time I was satisfied and happy in my second hometown, but once I started to want to go home crazily, the theme was no exception: eating.
My boyfriend always teases me that I have a typical hometown stomach, and nothing smells good except Nanyang noodles.
On the way home, I joked with my parents: stay at home for a few days, spend more time with you, and then repeat every meal as much as possible. The promise to spend more time with them became empty talk because of a group of young ladies' party. Fortunately, the task of not eating the same food was completed without any discount.
Life in my hometown begins with the ear of wheat.
Cheng Xiao breakfast
At my invitation, my father will accompany me to have my first breakfast-beef soup.
A day in a small town begins with a bowl of beef soup. Or a pot.
At seven o'clock in the morning, I washed downstairs, and my father drove the electric car out of the speed. The destination beef soup shop is near the back wall of Wollongong. Zhuge Liang wrote a "model", leaving a sentence: "I am dressed in cloth and cultivated in Nanyang." Become a descendant of the town.
Park the electric car on the side of the road, and the diners in the beef soup shop are already bustling. Old people, children, strong men and ladies are all crowded on the low table outside the store. They sat on the busy roadside, sucking with bowls and pots.
No one can resist the temptation of a bowl of beef soup.
First go to the store and weigh 20 yuan of beef, put it in an empty bowl, and then walk to the window facing the street with your bowl. The master took a long spoon, fished out a spoon from the early-cooked soup pot and poured it into the soup bowl held by the guests. Stir-fried onions, chopped parsley and raw onions are placed on the counter, and condiments such as salt and pepper are placed on the table, which can be added at will according to personal preferences.
My soup is made without coriander and salt. My father's soup is made with thick coriander, so the fun of different tastes is generally the same.
Find a good seat and sit down. Before you can talk, pick up the soup bowl and take a sip along the bowl. The mellow soup lingers between the lips and teeth, the pores are all open, and the whole body is comfortable. Then grab a piece of beef and chew it. The delicious meat is full of fragrance. Next, you can have a short talk with your parents.
Every bowl of soup will also give you a pot helmet, which can be broken or destroyed. However, I prefer the shredded pork soaked in Luoyang mutton soup to the hard pot helmet. Cut the bread into shreds and soak it in the soup. Soft and delicious, it makes people memorable.
Beef is weighed separately, and beef soup continues indefinitely. There are always households with their own cauldrons, full of them, grab a handful of chopped green onion, cover the lid, and take them home for breakfast.
Generally, beef soup restaurants sell beef soup in the morning, beef Huimian Noodles at noon and fried beef, braised beef and cold beef at night. Similar to the beef soup shop, there is also a mutton soup shop, which eats the same, a piece of meat, a bowl of clear soup and various pasta.
Such beef mutton soup shops are everywhere in small cities.
The best combination of meat and noodles is perfectly reflected in the soup restaurant in the small town.
(Daily life of beef and mutton)
Mutton and beef are indispensable meat in the life of small town residents. They are not only used for drinking soup, eating meat and cooking noodles, but also important ingredients of the legendary Henan Hu spicy soup.
On the last morning of driving south, you must drink a bowl of hot mala Tang.
?
Walking into Hu spicy soup shop, throwing napkins everywhere, satisfied diners and busy dining windows, we weave a map of the daily diet of the small town. I think of a colleague from the south who once talked about the experience of drinking Hu spicy soup in Zhengzhou. The basket full of fried dough sticks is covered with a thick layer of oil stains, and the table is covered with residue stains, which is too scary.
People in small towns are really lazy and don't pay attention to hygiene, but when you sit down and have a bite of hot soup, nothing matters. In a small town, the casual and rough life of ordinary citizens in the market is also reflected in their informal and casual temperament to some extent.
I got up late in the morning and took my mother to the store. First, I filled a bowl of mutton hot soup. After thinking about it, I brought a bowl of tofu brain and cut a small piece of oil cake. Mom is still drinking her mung bean porridge and eating fried dough sticks.
Sprinkle pepper on the mutton soup and boil it into a paste, with auxiliary materials. In a small town where the temperature has just dropped to more than 10 degrees, it will make you feel refreshed to take a sip and sweat, and then take another bite of oil cake.
I prefer sweet drinks to Yuxian's mouth in the morning. My favorite drink is tofu. Tofu is finely ground, smooth and sweet, and has no bean dregs at all. Sprinkle a spoonful of sugar on the pure tofu brain, which is full of refreshing and comfortable.
People in small towns not only drink beef mutton soup and hot soup for breakfast, but also like to eat all kinds of porridge, rice and bread. Porridge in small towns is usually sweet porridge, such as wheat kernel porridge, millet porridge and eight-treasure porridge. There are many kinds of bread: pancakes, thousand-layer cakes, oil cakes and oil cakes.
When I was a student, a bowl of porridge and a pancake was the most daily melody.
Breakfast, accompanied by the rising sun in the morning, awakens tired people and carries the hope of a brand-new day.
(The picture is really ugly. If you like to eat, you really like to eat.)
Town lunch
Soon after breakfast, we will start thinking about lunch.
The first lunch after returning home must be jiaozi.
There is a proverb in a small town: welcome Jiaozi to see him off, go in and come out in Jiaozi. Guests from afar, travel-stained people who come home all want to eat a bowl of jiaozi. In the era of material scarcity, Bao jiaozi is the most grand welcoming ceremony.
Few people pay attention to the profound meaning of jiaozi noodles now, but my family eats more jiaozi because my mother likes it. She is a poor cook and doesn't cook well, but she has several unique skills in the kitchen, and jiaozi is one of them.
Dumpling skins are stuffed with pork and cabbage and bought in noodle shops. They are all directly ground by machine in the butcher shop, wrapped and steamed in a pot. She wraps jiaozi quickly, and a few words can wrap a drawer. I won't pack jiaozi, because she always dislikes my slow packing, so she won't teach me.
Compared with my mother's convenience and laziness in packing jiaozi, the old man should pay more attention to packing jiaozi. Jiaozi should mix it by himself, roll it over and over with a dough press, and finally press it into dough, and then cut it one by one, and the stuffing should be chopped by himself. I bought meat and vegetables and chopped them into a symphony concerto with a bang. They think that jiaozi, who celebrates festivals and greets guests, is careful enough.
People in small towns eat jiaozi from Lunar New Year to New Year's Eve. You can eat jiaozi at all festivals you can imagine, and you can also eat jiaozi every day. This habit can be traced back to Zhang Zhongjing in the Eastern Han Dynasty. Zhang Zhongjing, who wrote Treatise on Febrile Diseases, is from a small town. It is said that he invented the prototype of jiaozi, "Joule". When he eats jiaozi on the solstice in winter, his ears will not freeze, which means harmony and warmth.
My coarse grains are just a cage of jiaozi and a bowl of egg tea.
Egg tea may be regarded as a small-scale special diet. Beat a raw egg in an empty bowl, rush into boiling water, sprinkle a little salt or sugar, pour a mouthful of sesame oil, and stir it with chopsticks to make it a bowl of rice. This is my dad's trick to get rid of fire. Every time he gets angry at dinner, he always says, just drink a bowl of egg tea. I don't know whether it's really useful or his psychological effect, but egg tea is indeed a necessary subject in my family.
Except jiaozi, I will definitely eat steamed noodles for lunch. First, I will steam the noodles, then spread fried beans and fried meat layer by layer, and continue to steam them in the pot. I will pour a thick layer of lard and drop a few drops of sesame oil, which is another unique skill of my mother.
Beans are crisp and sweet, pork is fragrant, and noodles are soft and fragrant! Nothing is more pleasant than steamed noodles.
In a small town, there are many ways to make flour, among which there are too many kinds of noodles and cakes.
People in Shaanxi and Shanxi eat pasta best and eat it to the extreme. It is much simpler for people in Henan to eat noodles, but there are many kinds, such as Guo Qiang noodles, batter, noodle soup, dried noodles, steamed noodles, Lamian Noodles and, of course, the most famous emblem noodles in Henan.
People in small towns eat rice noodles, while rice noodles in Fangcheng eat more. Fangcheng is a county under the jurisdiction of Nanyang and the birthplace of Zeng.
People in small towns have their own atmosphere when they eat emblem noodles, which is different from what they eat in other places. In Hui noodle restaurants in other places, people eat more freshness, or nostalgia. They all eat noodles, just like eating a big meal, but in a small town, people hold a big bowl, one emblem is torn into a big bowl, poured with thick mutton soup, or peeled off a few garlic, and the image is nothing.
Sitting in the Hui noodle restaurant, at first glance, a few bottles of beer, a few cold dishes, a celadon bowl filled with a large bowl of noodles, and diners are making a loud noise, which is the main theme of Henan noodle restaurant.
Town dinner
It is impossible to go home without eating a vegetable box. My mother's specialties include vegetable boxes.
You can eat a vegetable box and mix noodles quietly at night.
A lunch box is a kind of cake. Add flour and water, then add a few eggs, stir them into a paste, pour them evenly on a pan and spread them into pancakes.
If you put a thick layer of leek egg mixture on the cake, it is a vegetable box;
If simple pancakes are boiled in water, it is another kind of batter soup.
This recipe is simple to say, but it takes skill to make it really well. The batter is too thin to make a cake, too thick and too thick. I have made pancakes several times, and they all ended in failure, but fortunately, I threw the failed pancakes into the water and cooked them, which is another kind of batter I miss. I also ordered takeout of leek boxes several times. Their cakes are fried with sugar and loose leek vermicelli, which is not the usual way to eat.
Whether it's pancakes, vegetable boxes or batter soup, they are all my dream lovers.
Eating the lunch box made by my mother has a different meaning. In addition to mom's cooking, there is a familiar taste.
The leek used in the vegetable box is a legendary pollution-free vegetable. Father planted leeks in several simple small flowerpots on the balcony, with garlic sprouts and coriander, and a small wild flower sent by others.
Growing vegetables seems to be a habit in China. My father devoted a lot of thoughts to his shapeless small vegetable garden, watering, weeding and fertilizing every day. When I got home, the leek had just grown to its fullest. I cut a few pots of leeks, just enough to spread a vegetable box. Yes, it is.
Although the leek box has different practices in different places, the name is familiar to the public and there is too little noodle water. Until now, I don't know if only people in small cities can drink noodles of water.
Stir the flour and water into a paste (this is a familiar step), pour it into a boiling pot, add some raw egg liquid to the pot, and keep stirring until the noodles are cooked and ready to drink.
No salt, no sugar, nothing, so simple and rude (I have to say that people in small towns really don't pay attention to eating), noodles are still my favorite dinner!
A sturdy vegetable box, a soft and sweet pancake, a bowl of sticky noodles, full of food and drink, lying in bed, falling asleep in the nagging of parents.
From this perspective, the taste of hometown may refer more to the rice cooked by mother.
I think every place has its own flavor, and only the hometown stomach of people wandering in a foreign land has the most experience.
Sometimes, we miss our hometown, not because of how good it is, but because you have a greater sense of belonging to your hometown. That's the feeling that you are immersed in your bones from ignorance to understanding the world.
When you embark on a road, this road goes from your primary school to junior high school and then to high school. There are countless foggy mornings and foggy nights. Ignorant teenagers walk around again and again, and the familiarity in blood spray makes the teenagers who have grown into adults clearly feel that nothing has changed.
Even if the food street was once empty, and the new tea shops all over the street were colorful, there was no longer anything you were familiar with. To put it bluntly, everything has long been unrecognizable. You still feel that you are in the same strain as this land.
Just like Yu Guangzhong, who grew up in his hometown at the age of 22, and then spent nearly 70 years reminiscing about his hometown, or Jin Yong, who left the mainland at almost the same age, never left the motherland in his writing. ?
Wanderers who have left their homes read Yu Guangzhong and Jin Yong, because only wanderers know wanderers best. Neither of us is happy-until the end of time, both authors and readers expect to express their deep concern for their hometown in words with their thoughts.
Wanderers don't miss their hometown because of the unsatisfactory life. On the contrary, most of them live well in real life, so they choose to take root in a different place far from home. For them, hometown is more of a traditional adherence to "life has death and land", a unique memory in life and the original meaning of life.
People who have a hometown are lucky. They know where they come from, no matter where they will go in the future, there is always a place in the distant place where they can care about each other.
September 9th, Sauvignon Blanc.
Last year, on the Double Ninth Festival, I couldn't find chrysanthemums anywhere, and I couldn't find drinking friends anywhere. I climbed the windmill everywhere, but no one put a dogwood in it. This is not the smell of festivals.
It also coincides with Chongyang, and it is rare to have a drink with my father when I get home. Wine enters my heart and turns into dew. The autumn wind raged outside the window, and the father and daughter were satisfied even if they were silent.
My mother accompanied me to the newly opened World Rose Expo Park and watched the Chongyang Chrysanthemum Exhibition, which made me miss a whole year's regret. How can you not look at chrysanthemums in September?
The rose garden is at the foot of Dushan Mountain, and the ancestors in the late Neolithic period have excavated jade articles on the hillside of Dushan Mountain.
But we won't climb the mountain today, because in a small town, "March 3, climb Dushan."
Looking forward to the next March 3, like September 9 at this time, becoming a gathering day.
The meaning of hometown is that no matter how far you go, there will always be a place in this world that is connected with your blood.