Grandma is very fat, eats a lot, has big feet, and laughs loudly. I heard my grandfather say that he was 27 years old when he married my grandma, and she was 20 years old. My grandfather was a blacksmith at that time, casting various living and farming tools for neighbors near and far. Grandma takes care of the housework and takes care of the farmland. Although the two live in poverty, they can still have enough food and clothing.
I don’t know much about the youth of my grandparents. At that time, they got married at the suggestion of a matchmaker. The two of them lived an ordinary life of firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar and tea. There was no romance as we imagined. , only working at sunrise and resting at sunset every day, facing the loess and back to the sky, hard work.
When I was a kid I was standing next to my grandma and I looked up and saw how tall she was.
My parents went out to work when my brother and I were very young. It was my grandparents who raised my brother and me. The hardships are self-evident. I grew up in a remote mountainous area in Chongqing. When I was in the first grade of elementary school, because the school was far away from my home, my grandma would get up early to make breakfast for me every day before dawn, and also fill my iron lunch box with a lunch box. Eat, although the food is simple, it is delicious.
Grandma often uses ordinary ingredients to make delicious dishes. Every autumn, after the home-grown flat peas are mature, take the tender flat peas and the purchased rice flour (rice), wash the bacon and cut it into shreds, then add other simple seasonings, mix them evenly, and then steam them. A delicious treat. The dishes at home always follow the seasons. After the eggplant and bitter melon are ripe, cut the eggplant into sections, hollow it out, wrap it with stuffing made of shredded potatoes, bacon, etc., and steam it. It is really delicious. Being ignorant, I always gave the bitter bitter melon peel to my grandma every time I ate minced meat. Now that I think about it, I really shouldn’t. Grandma who has time will grind the raw potatoes into a paste, remove the excess water and make them into pancakes. After frying the pancakes, they will be stir-fried with bacon. The potato pancakes will be soft, glutinous and delicious, and the bacon will be very fragrant. Grandma cooks a lot and puts chili noodles in everything. Although I don't like steamed potatoes, if I can dip them in the chili sauce made by my grandma, I would rather forget about it. Grandma grows her own konjac, and goes through multiple processes to make konjac tofu every Chinese New Year. It is usually stir-fried with pickled radish slices. The recipe is extremely simple, but it is very good for rice. I remember when I was very young, my grandparents boiled endless sweet potatoes into sesame candy, which was dark, sticky, and very sweet. This is the sweetest memory of my childhood. Every Dragon Boat Festival, my grandma would make a lot of rice dumplings with corn syrup, and bake a few on the kitchen stove after the meal. The baked rice dumplings would be brown on the outside and very sweet on the inside, which is equivalent to a "Taizui" (Chongqing dialect) snack. The homemade chopped peppers and dried prunes are all hand-pickled by grandma.
Grandma may not realize how good her cooking skills are, but for me, every dish she cooks tastes like home and is an irreplaceable memory.
My family usually eats three meals of rice and stir-fried vegetables a day, and grandma cooks them all by herself. Because there is only one coal stove and no electrified equipment, the cooking time often takes a long time, so the meal time is later than other families. I am ignorant. I tend to be whiny and have many things to apologize to my grandma for, and this is one of them. My brother and I hardly ever washed dishes or washed clothes since we were young. Grandma helped us do all the laundry. It’s really embarrassing to think about it now. After school or summer vacation, I always like to go to my friends’ houses to play double dunk (a way of playing poker). At every meal, I would hear my grandpa or grandma loudly calling me to go home for dinner. At that time, I felt very shameless and in my heart I was very disgusted. Looking back now, I was really narrow-minded. Sometimes I don't go home for a whole day, and my grandpa will often take care of me when I get home, but grandma will protect me almost every time.
Of course, my grandma would hit me sometimes, such as when I slept in and didn’t get up. The beating made me scream, but I had no choice but to get up obediently. I often turn on the light to do my homework at night because of my playfulness. My grandma would always say to me: "If you are not busy in the morning, you will feel flustered at night and mend your crotch in the middle of the night." What a classic quote!
I particularly miss the time when my family was growing rice when I was a child. My grandma would pickle salted duck eggs in advance. Every villager who helped transplant rice would have a salted duck egg. This is our tradition there. Of course I also had one. At that time I am extremely happy. What I miss is not the duck eggs, but the carefree childhood and my grandma’s healthy and strong body.
As I grew older, my grandma became more and more rickety.
I am quite lucky that I "know" how to read and did not go out to work early like other friends in the village because I was tired of studying. , marry early and have children. But as I entered higher education, I moved farther and farther away from home, and the time I didn’t see my grandparents became longer and longer. The scary thing is that I was never aware of the physical pain my grandma was suffering, or rather, I was aware of it but turned a blind eye.
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