She Only Cares About Cultivation-Chapter 737: [731] Beast World Farming 41 (1 update) 3000 words
Because the sweet potatoes, potatoes, and lotus roots were all quite big and starchy, and previously there was no time, but now entering the Cold Season, there wasn’t much else to do, so every day the family would use a stone mortar to grind the juice, which they would collect in a fine net made of hemp rope. They squeezed hard, the water was kept, and the residue was collected to feed the pigs, cattle, and sheep at home.
Oh, to prevent these animals from freezing, they had driven them all back to the cave they previously lived in. There had been people who wanted to rent their house, but since the cellar could still be used to store things, they could not bear to give it up; this made the interested parties quite unhappy. However, Tangtang didn’t care whether they were happy or not—it was her place, so she had the final say.
After the starchy water was ready, it was scooped into either a stone or earth trough to settle for a day. Once the top turned into clear water and the bottom into starch, the clear water was poured out. Then, the starchy solids were placed on a warm kang to evaporate. After drying, the solidified pieces became the initial forms of potato starch, sweet potato starch, and lotus root powder, which were then finely processed depending on her most favored dishes.
Of course, these tasks sounded easy but were actually quite labor-intensive; just grinding the starch took them more than half a month.
However, when she made the sour and spicy delicious glass noodles using potatoes and sweet potatoes, everyone in the family except the children under two ate them greasily and noisily, "Refreshing, truly refreshing! On such a cold day, we should eat something both sour and spicy. It’s really delicious."
These noodles were sieved from bamboo sieves she made, which were wide and flat. Then she added chili, chili sauce, seafood diced meat, minced garlic, scallion, and finally, a handful of coriander, rice vinegar, and chili oil blended together—oh, it really made everyone salivate and swallow hard.
But eating these wasn’t filling, what should she do? 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞
Tangtang chuckled and took out fresh meat, asking the Beastmen to help chop it. She added various seasonings to enhance the meat’s fragrance, then added animal fat to the stone pot, sliced the lotus root but not fully cutting through in the middle like a lotus leaf pancake, stuffed it with meat filling, coated it with starch, and then fried it in the stone pot until both sides were golden brown and placed it on a big scallop shell dish.
After cooling, it was served to the Beastmen and children. This was the lotus root dish from the past life in Henan, generally added during stewing and especially tasty.
It was very delicious when first eaten, but one could not eat too much due to its greasiness. So after letting them taste a few pieces of the freshly fried lotus root dishes, she would set them aside and forbid them from eating any more.
Once all the lotus root dishes were fried, they began stewing dishes in the evening, adding lotus root, cabbage, garlic sprouts, hand-made glass noodles, chunks of animal blood, and animal internal organs all together. This was the traditional method for the Northeastern stew, the Henan Big Pot Dish.
Later, each person received a bowl of rice, covered with these dishes, sitting at the edge of the kang and huffing and puffing—another meal commenced.
Since Tangtang took over as the family’s main cook, the Beastmen had grown accustomed to bringing back fresh game; with salt available, they no longer needed to drink animal blood. However, since the blood should not be wasted, she usually made it into Blood Tofu with salt and stored it in her space, taking out a piece to eat like tofu whenever desired.
If the game died, the blood would not flow, so it had to be live game brought back, freshly killed and placed immediately.
Of course, as animals varied, the taste of various kinds of blood also differed. She felt the most delicate was duck blood, but having been here so long, she hadn’t found any ducks.
Besides animal blood, skins and furs were peeled by the Beastmen, who were skilled at obtaining perfectly intact pelts.
As for the internal organs, she would sort them by animal type, placing each in a jar. Once a jar was full, she would place it in the big stone pot for braising. Now, her seasonings were quite complete; although she had no soy sauce, oyster sauce was available and even tastier, making a savory concoction that made all the Beastmen of the tribe crave it.
Because of the delightful smells coming from their house every day, other Beastmen came to urge their females to deeply engage and discuss cooking techniques with her.
But the various seasonings she collected in the summer had all undergone her tireful drying and brewing process, so she was reluctant to give any away, thus she chose her words carefully.
