Eating has been a constant topic since ancient times. With extraordinary wisdom, ancestors used local materials and mixed local products to solve the problem of food and clothing. Steaming, frying, pickling, air-drying, all kinds of eating methods, cooking different kinds of food with simple ingredients. Food enters the mouth and slowly collides with taste buds, and each unique taste is introduced into the brain. Tea, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar and tea explain the beauty of sweet, sour, spicy and salty. Fill your stomach, rice is steel, and the feeling of the tip of your tongue becomes the emotional product of cooking after food and clothing.
1. Long and cold winter on the tip of your tongue
The endless plains and fertile black land, the harvest season is naturally a scene of "ten thousand seeds in autumn". However, in a golden joy, people suddenly realize that it is also autumn when the harvest is carried out, and the leaves are paved and the cold wind is coming. When the sound of winter came like a storm, the long winter night began his journey.
The winter time in the northeast is very long, usually from 1 1 month to March of the following year, which is considered as a complete retreat. For nearly half a year, one side of the land was completely lifeless. In order to survive the long winter, Northeasters began to store food in autumn. According to the population at home, they saved bags of potatoes, dried cabbage, dried peppers, frozen autumn pears and pickled sauerkraut, and tried every means to make the ingredients enough for the winter. Among them, the most unforgettable thing in winter is an altar of pickled sauerkraut.
When I was a child, my grandmother would start pickling sauerkraut in mid-October every year. Putting the dried Chinese cabbage into the jar, adding water, sprinkling salt and sealing it seems to be a simple process, but it takes a long time to wait. At that time, there will be a wonder in the yard. Cabbage will be sunburned all over the yard, and big barrels will be pressed against big stones. My favorite thing is to imagine the delicious taste of pickled sauerkraut in front of each vat.
After about half a month, sauerkraut can be freshly baked and the weather is getting colder and colder. When fresh vegetables can no longer find their shadow, sauerkraut becomes a treasure on the table. The smell of potatoes and meat and pickles overflowed in the early stage of making. Potatoes and meat are sweet but not greasy, and sauerkraut is sour but not contradictory. Outside in the snow and ice, walk into a warm room and taste a hot sauerkraut, and happiness will flood into your heart from the tip of your tongue. When I was a child, I was picky about food and didn't like meat very much, but every time I stewed meat with sauerkraut, I would accept it all.
Two or three months into winter, the Chinese New Year will be celebrated, and jiaozi with sauerkraut is indispensable for the New Year's Eve dinner. The time of enjoying delicious food with my family every year slowly took root in my memory and became the warmest memory of my childhood. When I walked out of the northeast and out of this land, the most missed taste on the tip of my tongue was this kind of sauerkraut with a strong homesickness.
My mother once said: "In that era of underdeveloped materials and inconvenient transportation, sauerkraut was the highlight of the winter table. Whether it is food and clothing or solving problems, it is the credit of sauerkraut. " Yes, with the development of society, it is not unusual for fresh vegetables to appear on the table in winter in Northeast China. In autumn, the scene of every household's hard work in hoarding vegetables suddenly ran out, and sauerkraut was slowly accused of eating too much, which would affect health. However, this still can't stop the hometown people from loving it. Pickled sauerkraut seems to have been engraved in the hearts of hometown people with difficult years. Every pickling and eating is not because of food and clothing, but because of a feeling and love.
2. watermelon love in hot summer
Winter is very long, winter goes to spring, but spring in my hometown is very short, suddenly it gets warmer, and summer comes late. Although the weather in winter is extremely cold, it will still be unbearable and sweaty in summer.
My hometown is rich in watermelons. When there is no air conditioning and wifi, the happiest thing in hot summer is to eat a delicious iced watermelon. Put the cut watermelon in the refrigerator to cool for a while. At this time, watermelon is the best food to relieve summer heat. In the summer when I was a child, every time I came back from playing outside, the first thing I did was to eat a few mouthfuls of big watermelons. In the evening, the family sat around the yard, eating watermelons and chatting. I am greedy and always ask my mother to cut more watermelons and eat them quickly, as if I were afraid that someone would grab my watermelon. Grandpa took a cattail leaf fan, and before I finished eating, he pointed to the poems in the book and taught me to recite them sentence by sentence. Sometimes I listen to grandpa carefully, sometimes I make faces and recite poems, which makes the whole family laugh. At that time, happiness was long, life was slow and happiness was full. The cool Xia Feng blew by, looking up at the sunset gradually turning the sky into red and blue, as if time had stopped in those dreams in late summer, slowly came, but flew away.
In the days after I entered school, I studied at my desk in summer nights, and a cup of sweet freshly squeezed watermelon juice was always prepared by my mother. There will be no mistakes every summer, and it will last for more than ten years. Between the pages of the book and the textbooks, there is a mixture of mother's company day by day. In the college entrance examination preparation room, it was my mother who cut pieces of watermelon and put them on the table gently, without urging or blaming. It was this cup of watermelon juice that became a decompression product in my study in the summer of those years. Every bite is sweet, with the warm love of my mother flowing into my heart, beating in my heart, suppressing boredom and anxiety. In this era of ubiquitous air conditioning, on those nights in midsummer, I still like to hold half an iced watermelon, dig it slowly with a spoon, and serve it with a cup of freshly squeezed watermelon juice. Between the aftertaste, the stirring taste of the tip of the tongue turned into a feeling in memory, as if it were an instant return to the original years.
Dreams are thousands of miles away, no matter where my footsteps go, the taste on the tip of my hometown is wandering in other places, blooming in my memory, and I am looking for that deep homesickness in the years.