Source: Authentic Wind Objects
The four seasons are distinct, and there is no food from time to time
Gangnam people, the most exquisite diet men and women
In late autumn, Jiangnan, there is no shortage of "eight immortals of water" with fresh teeth.
According to folklore, the eight immortals such as TieQiu Li and He Xiangu traveled and met the evil dragon in the Jiangnan area; the eight immortals joined forces to subdue the dragon and left eight magic instruments, transforming into the "Eight Immortals of Water", and from then on Jiangnan was rich in products and the people lived and worked in peace and contentment - this dragon must be a deep foodie, and he was obedient to the eight kinds of cuisine, and his teeth were so rare that his teeth fell out.
How the Eight Immortals subdued the dragon, we don't know,
But the Eight Immortals of Water are the tongues that can really subdue foodies.
Photo/Visual China
After the frost fell, Jiangnan autumn was high and refreshing, and the afterscent of fresh lotus had not dispersed, and there was a sweet water red diamond, and soft glutinous chicken head rice with osmanthus flowers; the women who picked up the "Eight Immortals of Water" on the road also became a unique scenery.
Now living in Lingnan, the same water system is rich, but always feel that something is missing. Here there are all kinds of tropical fruits, roasted sugar water to eat abdominal pain, do not have to face the frozen three feet and no heating winter, but also less clearly changed seasons, as well as seasonal and other delicacies.
In Jiangnan, the scenery of the four hours, each beautiful,
Eating in the water is naturally different.
Therefore, whenever the seasons change, I will unconsciously look for the seasonal food of my hometown and talk about homesickness. Spring water chestnut summer lotus, late autumn mushroom winter celery, march to October white fresh, as well as bright red diamond, sticky and white lettuce, and Taihu lake lettuce, this is the famous "water eight immortals".
Tasting the delicious taste of this water spirit and fresh taste, I can't help but feel that living in Jiangnan is really a blessing.
Water eight immortals, missed on the tears waiting for next year
The table of Jiangnan people is always linked to the depth of the four seasons. Even if it is a gift, as long as it is a food, it is also seasonal; what mountain treasures and seafood may not be as good as seasonal ingredients - mushrooms with mud, cress with "herb flavor", and plastic bags in hand are all rare treasures.
Osmanthus wine stuffed chicken head rice, sweet and warm glutinous.
Photography/keepheart, photo/marketmap
Just in September, a friend in Suzhou sent a box of freshly marketed chicken head rice. There was no frost in Lingnan, and on a sunny and warm afternoon, I still got up to boil water, combined with fresh osmanthus flowers, and made a bowl of chicken head rice sweet soup, which was pleasant and warm.
Chicken head rice, also known as mustard, is mostly born in the shallow water of lakes and ponds, the leaves are larger than the general lotus leaves, flattened in the water, and there is a circle of short edges around the periphery, like a large pan. The summer in Jiangnan is sweltering, and the children are tired of playing in the water, so they climb on the flexible and firm chicken head rice leaves and lie comfortably for a while.
Chicken head rice, the unique taste of Gangnam.
Thick oil red sauce, not very suitable for chicken head rice. It is usually incandescent or boiled with sake to preserve the original taste of chicken head rice. When the west wind first rises, a bowl of osmanthus wine brewed chicken head rice, which is fragrant, sweet and warm, is very happy to think about.
I can't pick mushrooms, and I won't be blessed in Jiangnan
The weather is colder, and the hope of Jiangnan people for Ci mushrooms is also put on the agenda.
"Autumn wind blows, crab feet itch" time, is when the mushroom is on the market. A bunch of mushrooms with dirt were placed in front of the vegetable stall, inconspicuous, and there was a faint smell of earth. However, the old bread can quietly think about the plump fat and thin of the mushroom through the cracks in the dirt, because of the warm pale yellow.
There are also people who will not be able to look closely and buy it directly home:
"This year's mushrooms are not delicious wow! Very skinny! ”
Photography / Zhang Lutang
Ci mushroom, which is born in paddy fields, is eaten as a vegetable with bulbs and also as cifu. On the edge of the Jiangnan River, in the fields, as long as there is water, farmers will plant a few mushrooms.
My mother loved to make stir-fried meat slices with mushrooms. Wash and slice the mushrooms, cut the lean meat into thin slices, and marinate for a while with rice wine and salt. After the oil pan is hot, first add the meat slices and stir-fry, then add the blanched mushroom slices to continue stir-frying, and finally add water to simmer, and later out of the pot, the delicate and soft ci mushroom fried meat slices are ready.
Ci mushrooms, sweet and sweet with a little bitterness,
The slices of meat are tender and especially refreshing to eat.
Photography / King Knife Knife, Photo / Market Map Network
I've eaten a slice of fried pork with mushrooms, autumn is almost over, and there are fewer vegetables. Life used to be slow, and vegetables were divided into seasons. In each season, meet every vegetable, make a common seasonal dish, share it with your family, and live a poetic and beautiful life no matter how ordinary it is.
In winter, everything withers, but cress grows freely
The weather is a little colder, which is the season when water celery is on the market.
Old Suzhou knows that in the suburbs of the east of Suzhou, Chefang, Huang Tiandang, Guo Xiang and other places are all places where cress is planted. In winter, the cold wind and dripping water into ice are the best seasons for digging cress. The soil on the side of the ditch in the field is moist, and in the dry yellow weeds, a little dark green inadvertently emerges, that is, cress.
Everything is withering, the grass is dry, and the cress is growing recklessly.
The cress that has just spat out the tender buds is a very rich purple-red color. After the northwest wind, the celery leaves will slowly turn emerald green, which is particularly striking in a pile of dry yellow and haze. Pulling out the dry grass, the spatula was a centimeter or two away from the main stem, and the soil was dug up with force, with a thin white root whisker, with a faint smell of earth, and a cress was in hand.
This green color seems to tell people that spring is coming.
Cress stems and leaves are edible and can be eaten in a variety of ways. After blanching it slightly in boiling water, pour soy sauce, sesame oil and other ingredients to make it cold and mix, crispy and refreshing. Stir-fried with dried incense is also a big practice for cress. This dish, the color is gorgeous, the fragrance is fragrant, the cress is fresh and refreshing, the dried fragrance is fragrant and flexible, the two are blended together, flexible and measured, and the fresh fragrance is long.
I have never eaten lettuce, not to mention having been to Gangnam
After the Big Year, the blink of an eye is spring. The time for lettuce is here, but you have to go back to your hometown to eat it.
This plant, which resembles a water lily, is rich in gum, and the stems and leaves are smooth and greasy, and have no taste in themselves, but they are more rounded and delicious and tender in taste. Its taste is inseparable from water, and it is added to the soup with silver fish, which is the standard in the standard. Lettuce is smooth and tender, silver fish is delicious, egg whites are like silk, and the salty aroma of ham is like nothing, no taste, and every spoonful is a fresh taste.
Lettuce silver fish soup, rare Jiangnan fresh.
Figures/MarketMap
Lettuce picking begins in April and lasts until October in the autumn of Autumn, when people take small boats and fish large vats of lettuce from Taihu Lake. We eat its bud-like young leaves, and the lettuce grows very quickly, and within three or five days it will fade the mucus, and the edible value will be exhausted. Because of this, it is also a rare Gangnam delicacy.
The taste of lettuce is difficult to find without Jiangnan.
How delicious is it? Since the Song Dynasty, lettuce has been a tribute to the same as the flower stone class and the silk satin of Ayala, and the royal families of successive dynasties have led the trend of tasting Taihu lettuce; only the best lettuce will be smooth and tender to eat, and it is addictive.
The freshest in your eyes is the usual thing in Jiangnan
The world says that Hubei lotus root is the best in the world, but the people of Jiangnan are not very recognized. After all, this lotus root is famous in the "Eight Immortals of Water".
Lotus root, everywhere there is a wonderful place;
But homegrown, always the best to eat.
In Jiangnan, after the spring, it is time to eat lotus. When foreign cuisine was not yet popular, there were basically only two ways to eat lotus in Suzhou: sugar lotus and lotus powder.
Osmanthus sugar lotus, pale tooth color lotus flakes, lotus holes full of jade white glutinous rice, is good-looking. Sprinkle with golden osmanthus flowers and drizzle with amber honey to make the lotus flakes more crystal clear and fragrant. Sandwich a piece of inlet, the crisp of lotus root, the stickiness of glutinous rice, the fragrance of osmanthus flowers, the sweetness of honey, and the wonderful fusion on the tip of the tongue. People who don't love sweets can't help but fall in love with it.
Choose the big lotus root of the next year, and bake it crisply;
Paired with local sticky rice, it is fragrant and sticky.
Photo by Qibajiu789789, Photo/MarketMap
Lotus flour is a completely different way to eat.
In the middle of the summer afternoon, it is both hot and stuffy, and it always makes people feel irritable. At this time, there are cold lotus flour for sale on the street, served in porcelain bowls like silky jelly, buying a bowl when the mouth is dry, cool and cool, more comfortable than eating cold drinks. After eating the lotus flour, I watched the sun tilt to the west, and a cool breeze blew in the alley, and the day passed again.
The dried lotus root is ground into a powder and eaten with boiling water.
Photography / Moon Half Ran
Bitter summer, accompanied by osmanthus lotus powder, does not seem to be very sad. Even if it is a long winter day, when the stomach is a little hungry, brew a bowl of hot osmanthus lotus powder, delicate and smooth, but also warm and enjoyable.
Jiangnan people eat diamond horns and like raw snorts
In the lotus pond in July, the lotus fragrance always carries another fragrance; at the beginning of the night, the humidity in the pond will slowly send this hermit-like aroma - it is the diamond horn.
Many people have only eaten old diamond horns simmered over a small fire in winter. In fact, the old diamond with curved horns is only a kind of diamond horn; in Jiangnan, most of the diamond horns are eaten fresh. Freshly eaten diamond horns, the best is not the water red diamond, it is different from the two-horned old diamond, the mature water red diamond has four horns that spin outward.
I didn't expect it, in Jiangnan Lingjiao can be eaten raw.
The red diamond shell is soft and thin, with a lot of moisture, and the meat is tender and delicious, which is suitable for raw eating. The old diamond horn with shell is soft and sweet after cooking, which is another flavor. Between the heat and the white dew, it is the time when the water red diamond is on the market, and its color is very bright, especially in the quiet water, as if the water is dyed at once.
Pick one up with your hands, bite it with your teeth and peel off the skin, and the tender white flesh can slip into your mouth. In Jiangnan, there is food in any season, the taste of the water diamond horn is so light, the tip of the tongue can only stay a trace of sweetness, driving the hand to continue to fish in the water, until the fragrance fills the mouth.
The old diamond horn was cooked, which was another thick taste.
The diamond horns in Jiangnan can be eaten from white dew until late autumn, and can be eaten from the rising water of autumn pond to the water. Red Ling eats all the Qingling, and Qingling eats all the falling water ling. Like the old ling, the falling water ling can be cooked and eaten, although it is less tender than the fresh ling, but it has a little more thick sweetness in winter.
Grandma had a special dish, using diamond horns to make diamond flour cakes. Mix and steam the diamond noodles, rice noodles and sugar together. Fresh red diamond horns can also be juiced, then left to sit overnight, and then add a little white sugar, simmered in the water, no worse than the sugar water in Canton.
Water chestnut, russet, they know better than you
In the blink of an eye, it's winter again. During the New Year, water chestnuts are paired with rice, which is probably a custom that only exists in the Jiangnan area. Just like the northerners, wrap coins in dumplings and take a good color; Chinese New Year's Eve rice in the evening, add a skinless water chestnut, which means that digging a big water chestnut in the coming year can make a fortune.
Nowadays, water chestnut is a familiar taste for the people of the whole country.
Finally, let's talk about zibai, which is also my favorite food.
Suzhou has such a riddle, "look at a grass in the distance, look at the big belly aunt up close", the mystery is Zibai. It ripens twice a year and is generally available in the months of May and September of the lunar calendar. Nowadays, zibai is planted in small batches, and the yield is not high, but there are many dishes in season: zibai meat shredded, russet white edamame, oil braised russet white, russet white scrambled eggs...
It is white and tender, but it is also becoming more and more rare.
In the past, Suzhou planted a large number of russet white, represented by Huang Tiandang outside the Gate, the green russet grass is endless, and tens of thousands of farmers work diligently all year round for the sake of russet white. Nowadays, it is difficult to find authentic local white, the white land outside the gate has become an industrial park, and the rolling wheel of economic development has left everything without a trace, and it is not clear whether it is regret or luck.
The nostalgia of the Jiangnan people
It's all in this paddle sound and light shadow and the eight immortals of water
Zhong Lingyuxiu's Jiangnan has spirituality because of the existence of water. Aquatic food brings the taste of nature, wind, frost, rain and dew, can be tasted. Jiangnan pays attention to "seasonal fresh vegetables", that is, this truth, seemingly unrelated to food climate, humidity, etc., are retained in food in another form of energy.
Jiangnan, paying attention to the season, is the water, and it also eats the spirituality.
Photography / Que Mingfen
There is an aunt who settles in Beijing and rarely returns to Suzhou, and her mother-in-law will always bring her some white clothes back. Most of the northern traders did not understand the character of zibai, so they tied the zibai into a bundle and sold it on the street at will. In fact, as a kind of aquatic product, zibai is inseparable from water, and the only way to keep it fresh is to keep it in water. Leaving their hometown, most of them are old and stiff, like women who died young and early, which makes people remember their hometown more and more.
Nostalgia is inseparable from the taste memories of childhood.
Photography/Yi Liu Visual Studio, Photo/MarketMap
When he was a child, the family conditions were not good, and Zibai was generally used by his mother to entertain guests. When the guest came, my mother called me to touch the white field by the pond, fresh and white, taking off the emerald green coat, revealing a white and delicate body, and occasionally with a little fragrance of water and grass. Then in the edamame bush on the shore of the pond, pluck a edamame and you can fry it with the russet.
Edamame beans are first stir-fried in hot oil, sautéed until the skin is slightly wrinkled, add the white silk, and continue to stir-fry the two together, stir-frying. The edamame beans are interspersed with white silk, and the emerald green is dotted with a piece of jade white, like a surging wave of water. The white is tender and sweet, wrapped in the fragrance and soft stickiness of the edamame, fresh and tender, refreshing and juicy.
Living in Jiangnan is indeed a blessing.
The eight immortals crossed the sea, each showing their miraculous powers. The sour, sweet, bitter and spicy in the Eight Immortals of Water are all warm and warm hometowns and childhoods.