Chapter 87: Rebirth in the Nineties: The Tyrant Flower Chapter 87: Sadness

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Protagonist:

Chai Mi

"Chai Mi, why do you say your grandmother reported me?" Chai Youqing entered the room, washed his face, but still asked with lingering fear.

"Dad, don't bring up a sore subject. How would I know this? But I know that when the time comes, Grandmother will definitely say: Oh, Youqing, I'm doing this for your own good... it's all Chai Mi's fault..." Chai Mi thought of the scene of Chai Youqing going to ask Wang Huirong, and found it funny.

"My grandmother... and my grandfather, they're both the type who won't give up until they see the Yellow River. One is afraid of Xiao Doubao like... one is greedy for others' big capital. Whether it's preferring grandsons over granddaughters, that's a factor, but the main reason is still looking down on you..."

Chai Mi stopped halfway through speaking, saw that Chai Youqing had little reaction, and then said: "The children born to my aunts are also daughters, and they didn't dare give their granddaughters any attitude. They don't dare... they're just bullying you."

Chai Youqing nodded, then entered the room and said: "Make some soup to eat."

"Okay."

The soup Chai Youqing spoke of refers specifically to cornmeal gan gan.

It was still fairly popular in this era, but later generations would need to find special restaurants to have it.

It's not exactly a Liaoxi specialty; the whole Northeast has it, but other places have many specialties, so this isn't a specialty there. However, Liaoxi has few specialty dishes, and even fewer staple foods, so it became a local specialty.

Chai Mi had Chai Xiu tend the fire, while she took out the gan gan bed, mixed the cornmeal, added some white flour, and made gan gan noodles.

Because when eating, it's similar to boiled hand-pulled noodles, with a lot of water, and it tastes better when soaked in soup.

So it's called soup.

To increase the resilience of the gan gan noodles, Chai Mi also added some elm bark.

This is the soul of gan gan noodles.

In this era, elm bark was still plentiful, unlike later generations where it's mostly economic forests and elms are much fewer.

In ancient times, gnawing tree bark specifically referred to elm bark. Because other tree bark is hard to digest and can kill people. So during ancient famines, many film and TV works show people hard-eating other tree bark, which is purely a bit of artistic behavior.

What Chai Mi saw was only elm bark and pine bark; the inner part is soft, can be dried, ground into powder, and then mixed with some cornmeal and white flour before it can be eaten.

Hard-eating elm bark is also possible.

But it easily causes bloating and still leads to indigestion.

After cooking the cornmeal gan gan, Chai Mi took two pickled vegetable lumps from the pickle jar, used a small perforated rubbing board to make them into strips.

(I really can't find a proper noun for this; it's used very rarely, and I don't know what it's called. There are many local dialect kitchen tools—rolling pins, cutting boards, genchi'er... anyway, many can't be written in Chinese.)

Put it in the pot to cook, add a few vermicelli strands, and this gravy is done.

Placed on the table, the three people ate quietly until full.

Chai Mi tidied the bowls and chopsticks, turned to look at Chai Youqing, saw his expression was somewhat dazed, and although she didn't like him much, she couldn't help but worry a little.

"If my father had woken up earlier in this life, it would have been okay... having weird parents is enough to make him drink a pot."

Until noon, Chai Youqing finally couldn't hold back, and said somewhat helplessly in the inner room: "Chai Mi, why do you say your grandmother is this kind of person? I really didn't expect it. These years... yesterday when she met me she said you were no good, I ignored her, but she, the next turn, reported me... I wasted the land I planted for her for over ten or twenty years."