The worst time travel, surviving seven years of famine

The weather is very hot, but the weather is very hot.

Gu Liang has been a bit busy recently. As the Chinese New Year is getting closer, more and more customers come to buy wine from their house, and there is a constant stream of people coming and going.

Gu Liang is not only busy taking care of the wine business, but also busy stockpiling some necessities for the next few years. He reserved a batch of sulfur through the pharmacy in the town, but he hasn't had time to pick it up yet. This thing is not easy to order. It can be used as medicine, sterilize and kill insects, and it is also a good disinfectant. If an epidemic breaks out in the village one day, it can be used with quicklime to block the spread of the epidemic. What's more, sulfur fumigation can also be used to prevent moisture and corrosion, making the shelf life of grain longer.

Fortunately, Da Ni and Er Ni were obedient and helped Gu Liang share some of the things within their ability. A few days ago, Gu Liang brought back ten bows from the hunter. Although he had bows, the hunter did not have time to make arrows. After all, autumn and winter are the seasons when prey is the most plump. So Da Ni took her sister and cousins ​​to the mountains to find a kind of bamboo in their local area to make arrow shafts.

They were looking for a special kind of bamboo in the local area, which was slender and straight, with a tough texture and often grew in dark streams. Winter is the best season for bamboo. After they collected it in the mountains, they asked the mule at home to transport it back home. They could collect several loads a day.

The collected bamboo cannot be used immediately. It has to be dried in the shade for a year before it can be made. Then it is heated on the fire to carbonize its surface. At the same time, the straightness of the bamboo is corrected during the firing process, so that it can shoot straighter and farther.

However, these are all later stories. The Jiang brothers at home can make arrow shafts, and they can ask them for help next year.

It's not that Gu Liang didn't want to buy arrows, but recently, due to the purchase of medicine and grain, as well as the construction of river dams, the money spent was flowing out like water, and it couldn't be stopped. Because the expenses in the last few months of the year far exceeded the income, Mrs. Gu was unwilling to spend money to buy these seemingly useless things.

As for the money in Gu Liang's hand, he naturally had his use. After all, his space was magical, and it would be a pity not to use it well. He often bought anything he thought would be useful in the future when he went to the market and went shopping. He bought piles of fish, lotus roots, mutton, offal, etc., which were only available in large quantities at the end of the year.

The day soon arrived on the 26th day of the twelfth lunar month, which was the day to slaughter the New Year pig according to custom. Because the Gu family had a lot of distiller's grains, they naturally raised a lot of pigs. Compared with other pigs in the village that were raised on pig grass, the Gu family's pigs, which were mainly raised on grain, were fat and strong, and one was equivalent to one and a half of others.

Gu Liang has been craving for pigs for a long time. He slaughtered one pig for the autumn harvest banquet before. Unfortunately, there were so many people in the village eating together, and each person could not get much, so he did not enjoy it enough. Now, there are still six big fat pigs in their pigpen. No matter how much they eat, they can't finish them.

In ancient times, there were only black pigs in China, which were not the same breed as the common white pigs on the market today. White pigs were introduced from Britain in the 1970s. Its biggest feature is that it grows quickly and can be slaughtered in just half a year. Local black pigs take almost a year to grow up, so ancient farmers started raising pigs in spring, and when they were raised, they just caught up with the New Year, so there was a custom of slaughtering the New Year pig.

The biggest difference between black pork and white pork is actually the taste. Black pork has more fat in the fat, and the meat is firm and reddish. It tastes like "meaty" as people often say.

Gu Liang has lived in Lanxi Village for three years and knows how fragrant this purebred black pork is. Especially, his family's pigs are different from other families'. They are raised on distiller's grains, which is equivalent to removing the fishy smell from themselves. How can the meat not be delicious?

Originally, Gu Laohan only planned to kill one pig and keep the others for next year, but Gu Liang persuaded Gu Laohan to kill them all.

Gu Laohan said that if too many pigs were killed, the meat would not be eaten up and would not be easy to store. Even if it was made into bacon, it would easily stink in summer.

Mountain people have their own tricks, and foodies have their own ways. Regarding this matter, Gu Liang said it was a small matter. Only a small improvement was needed to keep the bacon for many years.

Jiangzhou, where Lanxi Village is located, is at the junction of Chu and Jianghuai. The method of making bacon is air-drying. In addition, the high price of salt leads to insufficient salt during pickling, so it is easy to mold in the summer rainy season.

Just add more salt to the bacon and use the smoking method in the southwest region, and the bacon can be preserved for many years. Once upon a time, Gu Liang was traveling in the southwest and accidentally entered a small village. He also ate the bacon made by the village grandmother seven years ago.

Meat.

Under Gu Liang's persuasion, Old Man Gu finally decided to dispose of all the pigs before the New Year to make smoked bacon. Anyway, the pigs would not grow meat after being fed for a year. Even though there were many people in the Gu family, it still took two days to kill all the pigs.

The last thing the Gu family lacked was salt. Salty salt and crushed peppercorns were evenly sprinkled on the pork that had been rubbed with white wine to complete the first step. Old Mrs. Gu, with her eldest daughter-in-law, daughter-in-law, Li Donghua and his two daughters, kept pickling bacon, while Gu Liang went to the village land temple to cut cypress branches for smoking.

Fresh cypress branches were combined with orange peels and rice bran, and smoked for two days in the side room of the Gu family.

After smoking, the bacon was transferred to the place where the Gu family usually steamed wine and hung it up. The bacon was smoked continuously with the smoke from the steaming stove, so that the bacon could be preserved for a long time. Strips of bacon were hung under the eaves, and jars of white wine were placed in front of the wall, giving people a feeling of wine pool and meat forest, and also giving people a sense of peace of mind.

With smoked bacon, Gu Liang naturally would not forget other ways to cook the New Year pig. He made sausages, noodles and lungs, bacon ribs, sour meat, blown liver, and bone pickles. Gu Liang even learned the way Yunnan people make ham and made four hams, which were placed in the house waiting for the flavor to be absorbed.

The Gu family was shocked by Gu Liang's various pickling methods. They never thought that there were such strange methods for pork, and they never thought that the methods of sour meat and blown liver could be like this. Second Aunt Li even thought that her nephew Gu Liang was good enough to be a royal chef for the emperor.

Gu Liang thought that these pickling methods were gathered from all over the world after the Internet, and thus became known to people. It was natural for the villagers who rarely came out of these counties to be shocked. After all, he was also very surprised when he saw many of the methods for the first time.

After being busy for a while before the New Year, the Gu family finally welcomed the most exciting day of the year after processing the New Year pig. The world is big, but the New Year is the biggest. The farmers who have worked hard for a year are finally willing to put down their work in the fields and take a good rest. The Gu family finally no longer has to do the troublesome work of brewing and steaming wine, so they can enjoy the atmosphere of the New Year.

Soon it was the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, and everything was normal. Nothing special happened. The only difference from previous years was that it was particularly warm during the New Year this year, and the sun was so hot that even the jackets were a little uncomfortable to wear. Due to the warm weather, the rapeseed planted in the fields was much taller than in previous years, and many rapeseeds began to grow mosses.