Adorable Food Goddess

Chapter 21: Do You Like Me?

Translator: Kats  Editor: Perriemix

On the second day, Song Qi came over to the house after breakfast to fix the broken table leg. After he saw how badly the table was damaged, Song Qi felt empathy towards his sister-in-law.

“Third in charge is not in a good mood recently, please don’t take it personally sister-in-law. Just treat whatever he says as passing wind.”

“You heard everything?” asked Ye Jiayao, embarrassed.

Song Qi shrugged his shoulders. “With that scream so loud? In the middle of the night? I am not deaf.”

Ye Jiayao muttered, “I just can’t be bothered to respond to him.”

Thank goodness, I put on such a show last night that no one suspected a thing!

Auntie Jiang came to give today’s portion. It was allocated per head, but Ye Jiayao was too lazy to get it. Luckily, Auntie Jiang didn’t mind coming to her house every day just to give her ration.

“You said you were going to make dumplings for the second-in-charge, so Old Yu gave an extra 500 grams of pork and 1500 grams of flour. The food is becoming more and more scarce, even the last pig was killed,” Auntie Jang said, sighing.

Ye Jiayao sympathized, but truthfully, she didn’t have to worry about these problems. Chunyu would hunt for prey every day, and Song Qi would sometimes catch a few fishes and prawns in the Lake Yanxia. There was also a huge excavated area in the mountain to plant all kinds of vegetables. Their food supply was still guaranteed its quantity and quality.

“That’s great! There is still some flour left from last time, so, if you’d like, you and Uncle Jiang could come and eat with us,” Ye Jiayao offered with a smile.

Auntie Jiang grinned widely. “Sure, that would be nice. Although, during lunchtime, the Kitchen need some help, otherwise, I’d lend you a hand in preparing the food.”

“That’s not necessary, Auntie Jiang. I can handle it by myself,” Ye Jiayao assured her.

It was time that Ye Jiayao needed, and the one thing she wasn’t lacking since she was brought to the mountain, was time.

After sending Auntie Jiang away, Ye Jiayao got started on preparing the dumplings. She had to consider the four people in her own house, the second-in-charge, the first-in-charge, and the Jiang couple.

After calculating, Ye Jiayao added three more tablespoons of flour, and another two eggs into the mixture to make the flour more resilient. She then proceeded in controlling the softness of the flour mix by playing with the water content. She decided to wait for Song Qi to massage the flour, and she started on chopping the dumpling fillings.

According to the preference of the two brothers and herself, Ye Jiayao prepared three types of fillings. The second-in-charge wanted to eat pork filling with Chinese chives, and Chunyu liked the filling with mushroom, cabbage and pork meat. Ye Jiayao was more partial to pork with wild rice stem. The others weren’t so picky and were amenable to eat any filling.

The deliciousness of the dumplings depended on the taste of the filling. In the modern times, because of the presence of HCL, people would boil the meat as they prepare it to get rid of any foam. However, in these ancient times, the pork was all natural and uncontaminated, that boiling it would just get rid of its natural flavor. Ye Jiayao only needed to mince the meat into fine grains and marinate it in all kinds of seasonings.

Ye Jiayao then worked on chopping the cabbage, adding a bit of salt in it, and then squeezing the excess water out to make it especially tender. The chives, on the other hand, didn’t need to be dehydrated as it cooked so easily that drying them out would ruin the taste. The rice stem needed to be cubed and stir-fried until it was about seventy percent cooked, and the mushroom needed to be fried in oil to bring out its fragrance.