Chapter 68.2

Translated by Aviana

Back at home, Yang Tiegen let Yao-shi make a rice slurry to paste the couplets and decorative paper cuts. Lin Qingwan picked a few she liked and also began pasting them.

The decorative paper-cuts that Yang Tiegen had bought were all simple-styled and had a fortune character (福) in them with different designs in the backdrop.

Good fortune paper cuts were neatly pasted on the windows of the second and third branches’ houses and on the kitchen doors by Lin Qingwan and Yao-shi. While Yang Tiegen pasted the couplets outside on either side and above the doors of the two homes.

Lin Qingwan ambled out to look and found them quite festive. Although here, the characters on the couplets were in black on a red background, unlike gold characters on a red background in the modern times in her former lifetime, she felt they were still pretty good.

All of a sudden, the festive ambiance of New Year unfurled. Everyone ate an extra bowl of rice during dinner in the evening. Despite her small appetite, Lin Qingwan too ate a lot.

At dawn, the next day, Yao-shi got busy making baozi and mantous.

Those stuffed steamed buns are called Baozi in Chinese (Bao Buns), and those without fillings are called mantou.

Here, the buns made at new year were all salty with fillings as cabbage and suancai. For some reason, Lin Qingwan had an impulse to make sugar buns.

Suancai is a traditional Chinese pickled Chinese cabbage.

Luoxia villagers were quite frugal. Even the mantous on new year’s eve was made from mixed coarse-grained flour. But Lin Qingwan decided to make it with wheat flour as the new year was a once-in-a-year event.

Anyhow, ever since they had begun making Laweixian and had a steady flow of income, Lin Qingwan bought mixed coarse grains seldomly. These days, they switched over to white rice and wheat flour noodles. At times, when Yao-shi felt distressed and reluctant to eat them on a daily basis, she would add a bit of maize flour into the wheat flour for noodles and stuff and make millet rice instead of white rice. Lin Qingwan also felt that as making money wasn’t easy, she could not always let her desires make the decisions and let Yao-shi have her way. Besides, having coarse grains once in a while was healthy too.

Though they had made the noodles the previous night itself and just had to make steamed buns and mantou this day, they were nevertheless busy the entire day.

The two families enjoyed the baozi and mantou taken just fresh out of the steamer during lunch and dinner.

The two little girls, Yang Erniu and Yang Sanniu, took an immense liking to the white sugar baozi made by Lin Qingwan. While Lin Qingwan became fond of baozi with suan cai filling that Yao-shi had brought from Yang-shi’s place.

The twenty-ninth day, Twelfth Lunar month~~

Compared to the previous days, they didn’t have much work to do this day. They just had to prepare the meat for new year’s eve. All the vegetable side dishes were ready. Lin Qingwan had prepared her own marinade and had marinated all pork, chicken, and fish the other day. Once they were all marinated, she had Yao-shi send the portion of them to Yang-shi’s place to have them try out her new dish.

In the afternoon, they made jiaozi. There was jiaozi here too, but they weren’t called jiaozi here; rather, they were called bianshi.

饺子 (jiǎozi): Dumplings 扁食 (biǎnshí): is an old name of dumplings. (lit. convenient food)

The dumplings’ stuffing was usually decided based on the type of ingredients available at home. However, the majority of them were made with pork and cabbage stuffing. In the peak of winters, vegetables tended to be scarce. During this time, the most common vegetable in all households was cabbage, radish, and pickled vegetables made after fall harvest by every household.

When Lin Qingwan and they separated from the main family, they weren’t given anything. Even the vegetables she and Yao-shi had pickled after toiling for a few days weren’t given to them. With no other choice, they bought two jars of pickles for the two families from Yang-shi’s place, who happened to have a lot of them, lest they were left with no vegetables to eat.

Usually, whenever Yang Tiegen visits the town, Lin Qingwan would have him also buy vegetables from the market there. However, the ones he could buy were, for the most part, just potatoes, cabbage, and the likes. Although only a few vegetables were available in this season, it was better than having pickled vegetables every day. It was an excellent option to replace them with something else.

Yao-shi wanted to make more jiaozi stuffed with pork and cabbage. But, Lin Qingwan, recalling yesterday’s delicious suan cai stuffed baozi, pestered Yao-shi to make some with suan cai and pork as well.

Yao-shi, too, let her have her way. Yang Tiegen and Yang Tiezhu, these two adult men, who couldn’t offer much help, had no other choice but to sit aside and watch their wives roll the dough and make the sheets to wrap jiaozi.

Yao-shi and Lin Qingwan wrapped up a bamboo tray full of jiaozis. Yang Tiegen picked up the tray and placed it in a one-and-a-half-person tall cupboard outside the second branch’s entrance.

Lin Qingwan had specially made this cupboard to use as a makeshift refrigerator. The climate in Luoxia village was frigid cold, and the temperature outside was akin to that in a large-scale natural refrigerator. However, the yard outside was used by Yang jia too. And moreover, Lin Qingwan found it too unhygienic to keep the food outside in the open air. That’s why she had ordered a one-and-a-half-person tall cupboard to be made. She had it specially customized such that the walls of the cupboard weren’t too thick and were just enough to serve the purpose of a cover against the dust.

But of course, this cupboard led to one amusing incident.

Once this cupboard was done, Lin Qingwan placed it outside to use it as a large-scale natural refrigerator. There wasn’t any lock to the door, so it was convenient to directly take out food from the cupboard.

One day, Lin Qingwan put leftover dishes in it. The next day, when she went to take them out, she found an anomaly.

Lin Qingwan was a meticulous person and had a clear idea of how much and where she had placed it in the cupboard. Thus she could tell whenever something was displaced.

Though it wasn’t that obvious, the contents of the bowl seemed to be a bit missing.

She was dumbfounded momentarily. After a moment, when she inspected the remaining contents again, she felt slightly revolted and threw all the dishes out.

*****

Chapter 68 Part 3 Teaser

Lin Qingwan suddenly felt as if smoke was coming out from the top of her head.

This silly idiot actually went and asked Yang Tiegen about this. Heavens, let a bolt of thunder strike me to the death.

Yang Tiezhu embraced his wife into his arms tightly, wishing to knead her into his bones.

“Sleep!”

Her furious roar rang out.

— Tomorrow

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