Chapter 69 From Field to Table

This job is not only dirty, but also unpopular. Most importantly, not just anyone can go to the city's public toilets to clean out the latrines. This needs to be discussed with the local street committee, since there are so many farmers, and quite a few fights have broken out over cleaning out latrines.

My father and grandfather had it easier. They paid the neighborhood committee 50,000 yuan for each trip, and they also had to pay 10,000 yuan in rental fees for the manure cart. That added up to 60,000 yuan.

Before Xiao Jiu could even ask if it was worth it, her second sister, Zhao Di, asked first: "Grandma, it's so expensive, fifty thousand yuan a time! With our few acres of land, even if you dilute it with water, we'd still need to poop five or six times, right? That's over three hundred thousand yuan! How much oil could you buy with that?"

“Silly child, prices change every day these days. If we use this fertilizer on our own land, we won’t lose money. We didn’t use it on our land last year, and look at this year’s harvest. Even if we planted sweet potatoes, the yield wasn’t very high. We have to use it this year. That’s what farming is all about. We can’t just rely on the weather, we also have to work hard. It’s lucky that your father has good connections with people. Otherwise, we might not even be able to borrow this manure cart and donkey. No matter how expensive it is, we have to haul it. Only when it’s in the field will our crops grow well next year.”

Actually, growing rapeseed produces not only oil, but also vegetables. In the early stages, you definitely need to thin out the seedlings and sow them densely. Once they grow up and their roots have taken hold, you can remove the excess seedlings. You can eat the excess yourself or sell them in the county town.

Even the steamed buns from their snack shop can be filled with rapeseed and tofu.

Xiao Jiu looked at his warehouse full of grain and oil and sighed slightly.

"These oils are all blended oils, not as good as the ones you press yourself, right? Good oil is only half non-GMO and the rest is GMO. It's blended oil that's specially supplied to hotels and small restaurants. She may have some, but she has to be able to sell it."

Relatively speaking, rapeseed oil that you press yourself is more fragrant, purer, and tastier.

At least that's what Xiaojiu thinks. This year, her family harvested about 400 catties of peanuts, but her father couldn't bear to press them for oil. Peanut oil is the most fragrant, but he couldn't bear to part with it because his wife recently figured out how to make peanut shortbread. They plan to bake some more in the afternoon to sell. In total, they only have about 400 catties. After shelling, there will be even less left. They estimate that it won't last long before it's all gone.

She always knew that farming was not easy. Every year when she went with her father to the vegetable greenhouse planting base to select vegetables, she would feel the hardship of seeing them harvesting vegetables in temperatures of 30 or 40 degrees Celsius, and she would also feel the difficulty of earning every penny.

However, plastic sheeting was hard to find back then. The plastic sheeting his family used to cover corn stalks was pieced together from various places and sewn together with tarpaulins. In those days, it was very difficult to find or buy a piece of plastic sheeting. It wasn't until the 1980s and 90s, when materials like fertilizer bags came out, that farmers found great convenience.

Currently, the industrial system is underdeveloped, and many things cannot be bought simply because you have money.

Therefore, plastic greenhouses are difficult to build, and with the addition of various storms and heavy rains, it is difficult to withstand them with current technology.

However, if you have a transparent plastic sheet, you can set up a small plot in your own yard to do an experiment, such as planting some vegetables in winter.

My grandparents love to eat sweet potato noodles. Some of their sweet potatoes are dried in the ground and left to dry on the spot. When they are half-dried, they are collected and dried again. The remaining fresh sweet potatoes are washed, mashed into a paste, kneaded with water, filtered to remove the paste and starch. The paste is left to settle overnight, and the next day the surface water is poured off. The settled starch is then collected and sun-dried on a sunny day.

After drying, collect them and cook them in a pot when there are many people at home. Then put them in a funnel to make vermicelli, with the pot of boiling water underneath, and cook them while they are being made. After that, rinse them with cold water, shake them out, and dry them outside. This is real vermicelli, unlike the cheaper ones in her warehouse, which are almost synthetic products. The slightly more expensive ones are not necessarily made entirely of sweet potato starch; they may contain some additives.

Every year, their family makes about 100 kilograms of vermicelli. Because there are so many people, they consume about a kilogram per meal, so being able to eat pork stew with vermicelli is quite a luxury.

After eating the homemade vermicelli, and then looking at the ones stored in the warehouse, I realized how different they tasted.

This year's potato harvest is quite good, and Grandma specially made 20 jin of potato noodles, saying she wanted to save them for the younger ones.

In her family, breakfast usually consists of cornmeal porridge with sweet potatoes, steamed potatoes and sweet potatoes, shredded radish and pickled vegetables, and a few steamed eggs for the children.

At noon, we would stew vegetables, with tofu and cabbage made by my grandmother, as well as some dried vegetables stored in the summer, kelp strips and vermicelli. It was a hodgepodge, with vegetables stewed at the bottom and either cornbread or steamed mixed grain buns on top. We would also simmer a pot of clear soup to quench our thirst.

As the weather gets colder day by day, we drink a bowl of soup almost every morning, noon, and night. The soup is thick in the morning, thinner at noon, and in the evening, Grandma usually asks my older sister Zhaodi to make noodles. Making noodles is quite simple: just marinate some scallions and cilantro, pour them directly into the noodle soup pot, stir it with a big spoon, and sprinkle in a handful of fresh spinach. If you like spicy food, you can add a small spoonful of chili oil. After stirring the noodles, the taste is truly unforgettable.

The hand-pulled noodles are very chewy. Sometimes, adding some cornmeal makes them into mixed noodles or thick noodles. In the summer, I picked a lot of sesame leaves, dried them, and stored them. Now, when I make thick noodles, I also add a little bit of sesame leaves. It feels more and more fragrant the more you drink it. Anyway, it's more satisfying than seafood and abalone in restaurants in later generations.

She doesn’t know if it’s because she eats these grains every day, but she always feels that only by eating these can she ensure her health, because she has never looked forward to every meal at home as much as she does now.

When her older sister went into the kitchen to cook, she curiously moved her small stool to sit at the kitchen door. Her sister was worried that the smoke would bother her, she said.

"Sis, I'm short, it's okay, the smell definitely won't reach me."

Zhao Di patted her head, both amused and exasperated: "You're quite self-aware, haha, this little one is so adorable! What are you trying to do by watching me cook every day? Do you want to learn to cook too?"

Xiao Jiu said confidently, "If I could reach it, I would have done it already. I'm sure I can succeed. Sis, I'll make it for you later!"

Zhao Di naturally took it as a joke, but only Xiao Jiu knew that if it weren't for her height, she really wouldn't have been able to stop her from trying.