take a wife to support the family

Chapter 14 Millet Gray Vegetable Porridge

The straw cushions, cotton quilts, and quilts all fully absorbed the heat of the sun, and the quilt covers were washed clean and refreshing. That night, when Lily and her clothes lay in the quilt, she was very satisfied.

The weather is getting warmer, and the willows are sprouting new shoots. At first, they are light yellow, and then the green is getting thicker and thicker. In the blink of an eye, thousands of them will hang down, like a bald old man suddenly turned into a young beauty, the most wonderful It is to have a head of hair like a cloud.

This is also the time when the farmers are most vulnerable, and the seeds need to be planted. The grain stored in the previous year has already been eaten up in winter.

No one cares about admiring the silky spring rain and the green grass color that is far away but not near, most of them are starving, their eyes are dull, and their shriveled bodies are dangling in the empty jacket.Sometimes, there are rich families in the city who come to Qingliu Town for an outing on tall horses or carriages. They see the beautiful scenery, but feel that the locals on the street are very annoying.

Among these hungry people, especially the villagers in the surrounding villages of Qingliu Town, the people in the town are relatively rich, and at most they don't eat as well as before, but they seldom go hungry.

Only Song Haonian didn't have any food in his family, and he killed all the roosters in order to replenish Lily's body, so he had to starve at this time.

If it was before getting married, Song Haonian would naturally have a solution: either go to Liu Yi's house for a meal or two, or go home and ask for some food from his parents, plus he can find some prey in the forest by himself, and he can handle it for a while. .

The best thing, of course, is that brother Liu Yi has a business, and taking his brothers out, not only will he not have to worry about food, but he can save some money on the trip.This is how Song Haonian's Wuguan money was saved in the past.

But now that he is a family man, if he is asked to beg for food from others to raise his wife, he can't do such a rascal thing.A man has a good face, if he doesn't even want face and has no sense of shame, that man will not be far from being a waste.

Lily has the experience of getting rich with a full stomach, but it is hard for a clever woman to cook without rice. There is no grain in the house, so she has to go hungry.Song Haonian looked at her with more and more guilty eyes, but she didn't know that Baihe was also very sorry: if her mother hadn't emptied Song Haonian's family, with the five slings alone, Song Haonian would be more than enough to eat meat every day throughout the spring .

Lily took the opportunity to ask him: "Does our family need spring plowing?"

Song Haonian liked what she said about us, and honestly shook his head and replied: "No seeds."

When he divided the family, he was allocated ten acres of land, but the family was not given a grain of grain. Since the construction of these thatched cottages, the clay pots and chests of drawers for storing grain have been full within a few days.

Sometimes I am really angry because my parents are eccentric, so I have the cheek to go back and ask for food.But if he brought his wife back to eat, he would be poked at the back and scolded as lazy. He wasn't that thick-skinned.

Lily sighed, after getting along with her these days, she understood that Song Haonian looked tall and fierce, but in fact he was not a bad person, and he was probably the honest and unpleasant kind when he was at his parents' house.Da Niu and him were husband and wife, they were really a pair of deaf and dumb, a match made in heaven.

Facing such an honest person, she couldn't say any harsh words, but felt reliable—she was an honest person who could suffer losses, and later became a teacher and became capable, so she still felt more at ease with the honest person in her bones.

Without seeds, the few acres of land in the family had to be abandoned, not to mention that the Song family had no cattle to plow the land. Lily pressed down on the idea of ​​farming honestly and sighed again.

The young couple were facing each other in silence, when suddenly someone called out: "Brother Da Nian, Brother Da Nian!"

This voice was very familiar to Song Haonian, he promised, and went out to open the door for someone, "Xiaofu." The person who came was his righteous brother, Wang Xiaofu, a street grocer.

Lily also hurriedly stood upright, met Wang Xiaofu face to face, and cautiously avoided going into the kitchen.

Wang Xiaofu greeted "Sister-in-law" and ignored Lily, talking to Song Haonian on his own: "The feather duster and shuttlecock you sent to me last time were all sold out. Here comes the money. Brother Da Nian, I’ll exchange it for food for you.”

Song Haonian looked at Wang Xiaofu, then at the bag of grain he brought, and smiled wryly: "How much did you get for that little thing?"

His brother would not be greedy for his money, Wang Xiaofu insisted on refusing to give the money, but wanted to send it in food instead, there was only one possibility, and that was subsidizing him secretly.

The two sworn brothers tacitly agreed, and Wang Xiaofu stopped talking nonsense to coax Song Haonian, but just smiled: "Brother Da Nian, I know it's not easy for you now, so don't be polite to me. There's not much food here, so you put it away first." , In the future, when I encounter problems, don’t I have to rely on a few brothers?”

Back then, Wang Xiaofu was sweet-mouthed and the most popular peddler in the town. Some other peddlers couldn't stand him, so they blocked him in an alley and beat him to death. It was Song Haonian and other brothers who passed by and scared them away. , to save people.

After that, Wang Xiaofu became sworn brothers with them and became one of Liu Yi's sworn brothers. The brothers went to those shopkeepers to teach them a lesson. Since then, no one dared to beat Wang Xiaofu because he was jealous of his business skills. .

"Baihe," Song Haonian was so grateful and touched that he couldn't express it, and called Lily, "Cook, leave Xiaofu to eat!"

The millet brought by Wang Xiaofu was soaked in water, and Lily found a handful of vegetables from the basket in the corner.The scientific name of gray vegetables is " quinoa", and they are everywhere in fields, roadsides, and behind houses, and they grow up one by one in spring.

In the modern countryside, Lily often feeds pigs with gray vegetables. When they grow up, they get better. Occasionally, they want to eat wild vegetables, and they also pick gray vegetables to adjust the taste. It is a kind of wild vegetables that are delicious and nutritious.

There is a layer of fluff and a layer of purple-red powder on the leaves of gray vegetables. These powders are inedible. It is best to dry the vegetables, blanch them in water several times, wash off the powder, and put them in the broth as a vegetable. .

Of course, the Song family has no meat. Lily boiled a pot of hot water and blanched the gray vegetables that had been washed several times in it twice. Watching the color change from bright green with a little grayish purple to dark green, she felt the same way, just Pour off the water, refill the pot with clean water, bring to a boil and add the cleaned millet.

Then cut the boiled and cooled Huihui vegetables into cubes, put them in when the millet is boiled until it blooms, roll it once or twice, take it down and add salt, and it becomes a pot of vegetable porridge.

The millet porridge was originally golden yellow, but after adding gray vegetables, the soup turned gray green, neither smelling nor looking bad.

Wang Xiaofu didn't refuse his brother-in-law to keep the meal, so he drank two bowls of millet gray vegetable porridge at Song's house. Lily couldn't help feeding the two of them, and said embarrassedly: "It's all my fault for being clumsy, I don't have anything good to entertain you."

She blamed herself for not having good food at home, and Song Haonian's face naturally rose. Fortunately, he is not the kind of person who doesn't know what to do. As soon as Wang Xiaofu left, he said to Lily: "It's me. It's useless, you can't let the mother-in-law eat. Don't worry, I will let you live a good life in the future!"

Lily sipped the porridge and was paying attention to the fragrance of wild vegetables. Hearing what he said solemnly, she frowned and nodded with a smile.

(End of this chapter)