The Treasure of the Kitchen
Text | Lu Congjuan
Buying vegetables in a small market, suddenly remembering that there was still half a bowl of cooked peanuts in the refrigerator, and the dinner suddenly became famous. Buy a handful of celery, a carrot, cut the celery into pieces, cut the carrot into strips (you can also dice them), blanch it in hot water, stir it with cold water, and pair it with cooked peanut beans, which is a dish of home-cooked dishes. A little salt and a few drops of sesame oil are delicious and light and refreshing.
Cucumber onions and peanut beans are also good partners. Cut cucumber and onion into diced, and mix a few drops of delicious flavor. Is the entrance a little bland at this time? Add cooked peanut beans and become colorful. Peanut beans can also be mixed with green and red peppers into a cold dish. Peanut beans are gentle in character and seem to be able to match any vegetables.
My house has a rotatable grain storage box with eight grids. One of the pieces is filled with peanuts and will never be absent. Beat rice paste, cook porridge, grind soy milk, and adding a few peanuts can increase the aroma. My husband likes to drink some wine with fried peanuts at night, just like Kong Yiji's fennel beans when drinking, one dish is enough. Over time, I have developed the skill of stir-frying peanuts. The peanuts I stir-frying are golden, and the heat and color are not accurate without quite high technology. Heat the wok, pour in the peanut oil, and while the oil is not hot, pour the peanuts into the bottom of the pot and stir-fry slowly. Fry slowly on a low heat and cannot be rushed. In the rhythm of stir-frying, you will hear the "crackling" sound of peanuts. At this time, extinguish the heat and continue stir-frying until the oil is gone and the pan is dry and the fragrance floats out. Quickly put the plate, the peanuts are still sizzling. Sprinkle fine salt and mix well, it will be cool and taste crisp and fragrant. Anyone who has fried peanuts has a deep understanding. Don’t look at this inconspicuous life, it’s not possible to fool things through it. If you get distracted, you will be "stupid" for you. Focusing on, focusing on your mind and holding your heart like water is the key to making good peanuts.
I remember when I was a child, for a peanut, the children secretly went to the fields to dig the soil and searched for the peanuts that the adults had just planted. They didn’t remember after being beaten. Before sowing peanuts, the team distributed the seeds with shells to each household, peeled out the peanuts and handed them over in full. A pound of shelled peanuts can produce six to seven taels of peanuts. The captain knows it well and needs to pay if he doesn’t hand in enough. So when peeling peanut seeds, the adults stared at the children's mouths, fearing that the peanuts would enter their stomachs. The riddles my mother gave when she peeled peanuts made us guess: "The house is a red tent, and there is a big fat man living in it." The precious gold of peanuts at that time was also the "treasure of kitchens" for housewives. The little peanuts at home were hidden and the children could not see them at all. When relatives came to my family, my mother took out peanuts like a trick, first stir-fry a plate and served it on the table, letting the guests drink the wine first, and then stir-fry an egg with seasonal vegetables to make up a few dishes. The stir-fry peanuts are considered a hard top dish among the meat.
In autumn, peanuts are about to be harvested, and my mother poured out the last drop of oil from the old oil jar. My mother was not worried about putting oil in the pan because there were peanuts coming to help me. She went to the field to pull out peanuts, peeled out peanuts, and put them in garlic mortar and pounded into minced peanuts. When stir-frying, first put the peanuts into the pot to stir-fry them to make the aroma, then add chopped green onions and stir-fry them with vegetables. The vegetables are covered with crumbled peanuts, which tastes particularly fragrant and tastes longer than peanut oil stir-fried vegetables. The vegetables in autumn include cabbage seedlings, radish tassels, green pepper sponges, eyebrow beans, eggplant, vegetable beans, , kidney beans, etc., which can be put into the pot with peanuts.
The main dishes in winter are Chinese cabbage, radish . My mother had a wonderful idea and made the food that was lacking in oil and meat very delicious. Fry the peanuts and peel them, and crush them hard with a rolling pin to crush them into pieces. Make cabbage dumplings and shredded radish buns, and put some peanuts in the filling, which tastes so delicious! Later, I made it as usual a few times, and it turned out to be as fragrant as before.
Peanut sticking was once the best snack in my eyes. My mother only made it during the Chinese New Year. Fry the peanuts, rub off the skin, boil sugar , add the peanuts and stir-fry, and sift the starch into the pot, stir-fry continuously, wait until the syrup in the pot solidifies, and frosting on the surface of the peanuts can be put out of the pot. After cooling, it becomes sweet, crispy and fragrant peanut sticky.
Peanut nourishes and nourishes, helps prolong life, so it is also called "longevity fruit" among the people.Although the material is abundant now and there are all kinds of ingredients, peanuts are still a fragrance that people cannot let go. When you go to a restaurant for dinner, you will first place it in a few small cold dishes on the dining table and there will be a small plate of fried peanuts. In summer food stalls, drink beer and eat clams and , and there will be a plate of fried peanuts and accompany them silently. Eating a bowl of spicy and sour noodles on the street, suddenly a golden peanut bean was turned on and put into his mouth. The taste buds stimulated by the spicy and spicy taste buds were instantly soothed by the aroma of peanut beans.
Peanuts are the "treasure of the kitchen". You can make boiled peanuts, five-spice peanuts, spicy peanuts, old vinegar peanuts , peanuts dried peanuts, aged vinegar spinach peanuts, peanuts stewed pig's trotters, etc. Grind it into peanut butter and you can make peanut butter bread, peanut butter cookies, peanut butter small crispy cakes, peanut butter noodles , etc. You can also use peanut butter to make hot pot dipping sauce and cold dishes. If you have a bad stomach, put a handful of raw peanuts in your pocket and eat a few pills a day, which can inhibit gastric acid secretion and protect the gastric mucosa. These small kernels! Even at high-end banquets, it still has a place and no one will look down on it.
Original text was published on October 28, 2022 "Yantai Evening News-Yantai Street"
