Chapter 1045: Chapter 431: High EQ: I Made the Mistake Every Foodie Makes! Low EQ: Gained Weight!
"Mom is quite important, she’ll handle the snowman’s head. Dad and I are in charge of the snowman’s body, and Dundun is responsible for overseeing and directing!"
Shen Jiayue put on gloves and assigned tasks to everyone.
However, when she and Shen Guofu were rolling a large snowball on the rooftop, they discovered that Han Shuzhen had made the snowman’s head into a giant sugar triangle shape.
Indeed...
It’s more suitable for Mom to just talk.
Usually when things are uncertain domestically, people call for Mom; but at home, it’s completely the opposite.
Shen Jiayue said helplessly:
"Mom, let me handle it. You’re someone who’s been pampered since childhood and spoiled by Dad, not suitable for doing things hands-on."
Han Shuzhen wasn’t pleased to hear that:
"It’s mainly because the space is too small. If it were the Medical College’s playground, I’d roll out a perfectly round snowman head for you."
Shen Jiayue: "..."
Are you planning to go embarrass yourself at the Medical College?
She said:
"Let me take over. If it weren’t for Dundun’s request, I wouldn’t be so enthusiastic."
Han Shuzhen also realized that the snowman’s head she rolled wasn’t great, and hearing her daughter took the initiative to clean up the mess, she didn’t hesitate. She stood up, stretched her waist, and casually asked:
"Yueyue, what do you plan to plant in this flower bed around the rooftop? Do you want me to plant some flowers for you?"
"My mother-in-law said she would plant some vegetables, like eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, and stuff. She calculated that if everything is planted, we could harvest quite a lot daily."
Vegetable planting?
Originally, Han Shuzhen wanted to say don’t joke around, but looking at the vast rooftop, aside from barbecuing, planting vegetables seemed indeed a good option.
Farming is an ingrained sentiment in every Chinese person.
Whether it’s beside rural fields, along the riverbanks, or the green spaces and gardens around villas and ponds, there’s the presence of people planting vegetables.
Even in narrow apartment buildings, it’s common to grow some garlic sprouts on the balcony in winter or plant a cabbage root in a flowerpot on the windowsill.
The rooftop has already been fully converted into flower beds, with good soil, suitable for growing vegetables.
Han Shuzhen took a look around, imagining the lush green vegetables sprouting in summer, she suddenly felt excited:
"Then we won’t buy vegetables in the future, we’ll just come up here to harvest daily."
"No problem, it’ll definitely taste better than market veggies."
While the mother and daughter were imagining the taste of home-grown vegetables, in Lin Ji’s Food’s kitchen, Lin Xu was alongside several assistants using salt to scrub each snow pear.
Coarse salt particles have excellent dirt-removing capability.
Especially for fruits like these which might have gum on the surface, washing with plain water often isn’t sufficient.
Using detergent always leaves a lingering taste.
Thus, salt becomes the optimal choice.
Holding a snow pear in hand, grabbing some salt, and quickly rubbing, letting the slightly coarse salt particles clean off the impurities and gum-like substances from the pear’s surface.
Then place them into clean water for further rinsing.
The dirty salt in the basin doesn’t need to be thrown away, just dissolve it in hot water, filter twice using filter paper and it turns into clear saltwater.
Whether making brine or pickles, it can be reused.
All snow pears washed clean, it’s time to core them with a knife.
Cut the snow pear into quarters, then swiftly remove the core with a knife; a single pear is handled.
The cored pears don’t need further cutting, directly placed into a large dough mixer, using the mixer’s dough blade to crush the pears.
Making Autumn Pear Paste requires simmering the chopped pears until thoroughly cooked, then retrieving them for filtering, the filtered juice is used for making Autumn Pear Paste.
Since filtering is involved, whether chopped or blender-crushed, there’s no difference with snow pears, crushing yields a higher juice ratio.
In large restaurants, when needing to crush a great amount of ingredients, they generally opt for larger capacity dough mixers over blenders or processors.
Larger blade heads churn more ingredients with better efficiency.
The crushed pears are directly poured into the large soup bucket previously used for Sour Plum Soup, proceeding to crush the next batch.
Even with removing the cores, a hundred pounds of pears leave quite a bit, requiring several batches of mixing to fully crush them.
Once all pears are in the soup bucket, it’s time to add medicinal ingredients.
For Autumn Pear Paste, one adds some medicine to relieve cough, alleviate asthma, clear heat, and dissolve phlegm to enhance the lung-soothing and cough-relieving effects.
Lin Xu brought Luo Han Guo, licorice, dried lily, red dates, loquat leaves, Chuan Bei, honey among other herbs and ingredients.
Break Luo Han Guo, slice licorice and dry lily, core red dates, then add them to the soup bucket along with loquat leaves and approximately three to four pounds of honey.
As for Chuan Bei, due to its rapidly-evaporating medicinal effect, it must be added last.
Add it too early, and it might lose efficacy altogether.
With all the ingredients in the soup bucket, Lin Xu also added a few slices of ginger, effectively removing the chill from the Autumn Pear Paste.
But since ginger is hot, it shouldn’t be added excessively.
Otherwise, not only won’t it relieve coughs, it might even counteract.
Once everything is in, cover the soup bucket and simmer on high heat.
This step requires roughly an hour to extract all medicinal qualities.
Having finished these tasks, Lin Xu went outside to find Dou Wenjing and Geng Lele had arrived, currently joining Chen Yan and Zeng Xiaoqi in anticipation of the noon’s big bone dish.
