C16

The instant she pushed the door open, both men in the room looked at her at the same time. Niu Dabao and Murong Mingzhu actually sat together for the first time. They weren't as far away as they were before. Wen Jingrong also raised her eyebrows curiously.

But when she thought of how they had not eaten dinner yet and how they had waited for her, she hurriedly put the basket behind the door and heated up the porridge. Without wasting any time, she broke off half of her beehive and directly used the poker to cook it in the stove, which soon filled the room with a wonderful fragrance.

Murong Mingzhu watched as she picked up a bamboo stick, picked out the white worms from the beehive, sprinkled some salt on it and passed it to Niu Dabao.

"Brother, let's eat the beehive. The Wang family gave us a tael of crushed silver for the honey." She looked at Murong Mingzhu again, hesitating whether to let him try it or not. Bee looked a little disgusting, but it actually tasted pretty good. It was a natural high-protein food, and it was very nutritious for these two patients.

Niu Dabao had eaten bees before, so he had no objection to this. Murong Mingzhu was curious as well as he was curious to see him eat it. He thought that he was not as good as a blind person, so he carefully tried eating one with an expression as if he didn't care for his own life. The skin was grilled until it was crispy, but there was still some softness inside. If one did not know what they were eating, the taste was still acceptable.

Seeing that he was willing to eat it, Wen Jingrong poured out half of the remaining beehive for him. "Eat more, it's very nutritious."

He took the remaining half of the beehive with a bamboo stick and carefully picked out the beehive. He put it aside and waited for it to be taken care of before he dealt with it. The porridge was about to roll into the wok. Wen Jingrong left a slit on the lid and scooped out some water to wash the snake meat outside. The skinned snake was still squirming. Actually, it had died a long time ago. It was just that the neurons in its muscles were not completely dead yet. At a glance, it was quite terrifying. Afraid that she would scare Murong Mingzhu, she cut off a piece of the snake meat outside, went back to the house to get some boiling water, and scalded the snake meat that was washed clean.

Luckily, the sky was already completely dark, so Murong Mingzhu never found out what she had been busy with outside for a long time. When she had a bowl of snake meat for dinner time, she only felt that the meaty soup was unusually smooth, and her roasted hand tore off the meat. The meat inside tasted like both chicken and nothing like chicken. Murong Mingzhu asked her what kind of meat this was curiously, and he was always tricked by Wen Jingrong as a pheasant.

The snake meat was already tender to begin with, and with Wen Jingrong's cooking skills, the three of them ate a round belly as expected. In the end, there was only half a pot of meat left. However, when she woke up the next morning, the broth in her bowl was already gone. She thought it was Niu Dabao and co. who were hungry at night and ate it without thinking too much. As for Hei Feng, who was hiding among the branches, he licked his lips in thought. No wonder his Royal Highness didn't even need to be persuaded when eating. This Niu family's girl was really good at cooking.

"July to August, September to October," was all about the beehive. This wasn't the best season for eating bees yet, but there were quite a few larvae in the hexagonal grid inside the hive she had picked yesterday. Wen Jingrong woke up early and poured the uneaten bee onto the straw mat in the yard, along with the other half that had been boiled in salt water last night. She didn't have to worry that the dried bee would be broken and could be stored for a long time.

At this time, the other two people in the room also got up. Wen Jingrong carried Murong Mingzhu out as usual and let Niu Dabao settle the stocks. He didn't know if it was just her imagination, but he felt that Murong Mingzhu seemed to have gained a lot in weight after staying in their house for so long.

With this doubt in her mind, she couldn't help but feel his weight in her hand. Her sudden action scared Murong Mingzhu, who immediately hugged her neck tightly.

"What are you doing?"

"Have you gotten fat?"

Murong Mingzhu: "..."

Wen Jingrong's careless words made him unable to let go of his stomach to eat breakfast. After being conflicted for a long time, she asked her, "Isn't it better to get fat?"

She was confused by the question, so she said instinctively, "It's pretty good, it's ugly if you're too thin."

Murong Mingzhu's appetite suddenly returned. Wen Jingrong's "too thin to look good" directly turned into "too fat to look good" in his mind. After drinking two bowls of yam porridge, he suddenly thought of a question. That's not right, why did he care about Wen Jingrong's opinion so much?!

While he was still struggling with the second question, Wen Jingrong had already carried the bucket to the yard and started working. Yesterday, he had carried this basket of grapes and rushed back and forth between the Niu Village and the Cyan Stone Town. Many of the fruits on the sides had been crushed. She picked the grapes one by one and washed them twice with water before putting them in a bamboo basket to dry.

Then she rinsed the jug carefully twice, inside and out, then turned it upside down and basked it in the sun. Wen Jingrong washed her hands, broke the grapes one by one, and threw them into the jar. This is an important step. If you don't pinch the grapes properly, they will explode when they ferment. Therefore, she crushed all of these grapes without any hesitation. According to the list, she would need one catty of grape juice for two taels of sugar, and throw them into the glacial sugar field at a rate of five to one. However, their family didn't have any scale. Wen Jingrong could only estimate that they had put more than five pounds of candies in the pot. She left the rest to the side to stew the sweet soup when the water pears ripened in the autumn.

Murong Mingzhu watched the entire process with pretty good eyes. When he first saw her clogging the grapes, he thought Wen Jingrong was making fruit juice. However, when he saw her, he realized that she was brewing wine. He was really curious as to where Wen Jingrong had learned so many things from. He had never seen her idle around again, cooking food in different ways every day. However, it was indeed quite tasty. Other than last night's beehive, he ate it all up.

Wen Jingrong, who had finished her work, rested for a while before taking the two baskets with her and left for the depths of the mountains. This time, she had picked most of the remaining grapes, leaving only a few bunches of unripe berries hanging from the branches.

Wen Jingrong had once seen how raisins came out in Xinjiang. The raisins that were directly baked under the sun were useless. The smell was sour, but the ones that were dried under the sun were high quality. On the mountain, besides their home on the hillside, there was a tower that had not been used for many years. It was ventilated on all sides and sunned all day long, just enough to dry the grapes in the shade.

Luckily, she remembered that they could handle the extra grapes like that yesterday, otherwise they wouldn't have drank so much after making all the wine. Otherwise, they wouldn't have drank so much, moreover, sugar was expensive, and Xi Chu didn't allow private sales of alcohol.