A Bowl of Jjajang, The Son-in-Law of Jegalse - Chapter 535
Only Noblemtl
Oil-burning bamboo insect
Sister Maeng-hee suddenly appeared in the cooking competition.
I knew that I was a little? No, I knew that I was very greedy when it came to cooking, ever since Sister Maeng-hee made me something like an elixir.
Well, from what I’ve been talking about, it seems like your sister’s future dream is to be a good wife and wise mother.
It was clear that she had a romantic dream of having many pretty children and preparing delicious food for her children and husband.
In reality, she knows how to handle the pot and wok like a housewife, and she is not a bad cook like Cheong or Yeong-yeong.
It’s just that I’m trying to make dishes that Yunnan ethnic minorities, such as cow dung hotpot, consider valuable.
To be honest, except for those things, the cuisine of Yunnan ethnic minorities was not inedible, so it could have been included in the culinary exam.
This dish is not something special, it’s just a simple dish you can eat at a street stall.
‘No, but no matter how much I think about it, it’s still strange.’
But no matter how I thought about it, this was a bit strange.
It’s not just anything else, but the fact that Sister Maeng-hee has advanced to the final round of the cooking competition itself.
I personally examined all those people during the preliminary examination, but I never let my older sister pass.
The preliminary round was simply a test of one’s cooking skills.
At that time, before Su Dongpo arrived, the preliminary applicants were not wearing masks, so of course I could see their faces.
Because I don’t remember seeing Sister Maeng-hee.
If I saw Sister Maeng-hee, there’s no way I wouldn’t remember.
It was just nonsense, even though I was none other than Maeng Hee, and I worked in the restaurant industry and was good at remembering customers’ faces.
‘How on earth are you here, Sister?’
But my suspicions were fleeting.
As if to answer my curiosity, the activities of internal collaborators were detected.
“Go, go, suddenly it’s Sister Maeng-hee from the past. Sister Maeng-hee was feeling unwell earlier and went to rest at a restaurant.”
“Yes, that’s right, teacher. It’s a bit similar to Maenghee, but no. Yeah, that’s right. No, it feels similar.”
“Hey, you’re confusing your wife with someone who participated in the past. Keep in mind that this is a cooking past.”
“Well, then, little brother, this is a civil service examination that the government inspects, so what if I mistake people like the elders say?”
“Cheongun is looking for a wife here too? Oh!? Is this Cheonggun’s way? Is this how he approaches women?”
Yeah, I feel like everyone else probably knew except me.
The conspirators were using a tactic to make a fool of me.
‘Do these people see me as a hottie with ice legs?’
Certainly this could not have happened without internal collaborators.
When I turned my head to look at the seats where the generals were sitting, I saw that they were all avoiding eye contact.
‘Just don’t say anything···.’
The wives, Brother Po, and the other Eight Kings could have done that.
Because if Sister Maeng-hee asks me to do something, I can’t help but listen.
Of course, Yeong-yeong and Ga-ryeon couldn’t refuse Sister Maeng’s request, and what could Hyung-i say?
My brother always feels like he owes me something, but if his wives ask him to do something, he can’t help but be at a loss.
But that guy Su Dongpo kept talking about fairness and such, but it turned out that it was all a lie.
The fairness he spoke of was probably the Central Plains-style fairness(?).
‘No, Cheongun-ah, honestly, if you’ve lived this long, shouldn’t you not forget?’
Yes, we should always remember that this is the Central Plains, but the localization patch is so perfect that we have forgotten to monitor it.
In the Central Plains, this level of expediency is as natural as breathing.
It’s not like relatives are prohibited from participating, but it’s a man’s virtue to be fooled again when they want to fool me.
But it’s no fun to just be fooled, so I decided to shake up my sister’s mentality a bit.
‘I thought it would be fun.’
“Oh, I’m sorry. I must have mistaken you because you look so much like my wife. There can’t be a more beautiful woman than my wife… Then, the person who resembles Sister Maeng-hee, please start cooking.”
“Ah, I understand. Unra… Ryu, Ryu Daein.”
My sister, clearly confused by my cooking instructions, put the wok on the burner and started cooking.
-Whew, Whew.
Like other chefs, my sister’s cooking began with the sound of stomping on a stove and then with pouring water into a raised wok.
-Whoa.
-Step by step.
My sister gently poured water on the floor and sprinkled salt first.
The small amount of water on the floor immediately boiled away in the heat of the hot stove, and the next thing my sister took out of the basket was a piece of cut bamboo about the size of a branch.
-Knock knock knock knock.
The bamboo that was taken out had one side wrapped in paper and tied with thread. My sister shook it like a bartender and poured it straight into a strainer.
Then, the surprised voices of Yeong-yeong and Ga-ryeon are heard.
“Huh!?”
“Eek!”
When Yeong-yeong and Ga-ryeon saw the cooking ingredients poured into the bowl, their eyes widened, so I whispered quietly in Yeong-yeong’s ear.
[Should I stop Young-young from cooking? Isn’t that harder to eat than a rat?]
Then Yeong-yeong rolled her eyes and turned her neck as if she was creaking to look at me, then forced a smile with the corners of her lips trembling.
[Why, why. I even let you cook a rat, a rat. I, I’ll have that one too. The bird, it looks weird… No, no, because it looks tasty.]
Looking back, I see other people who are also confused.
Other people forced smiles and spoke to me in my gaze.
“Huh, huh, that’s unique, but it looks delicious.”
“That’s true. Ha, haha.”
“Oh, there are a lot of unique dishes appearing today. Is this really a cooking show?”
The reason why Yeong-yeong, Ga-ryeon, and the others were stammering and nervous like this was because the ingredients that the older sister had taken out and placed on the plate were moving around.
The sieve was full of bugs that had been caught somewhere and poured out of a large bamboo bucket.
A long, slightly milky white body with grain-like spots on the sides.
The length is about the length of a French fries?
If you look closely at the bug itself, it looks like a living French fries.
-Mumble, mumble.
The bugs were moving in all directions, and my older sister skillfully handled them, and she swung the net once.
It seemed to be for removing excrement, but as expected, it was just insect excrement falling down the drain.
-Knock knock.
As the worm excrement drained out under the strainer, my sister immediately put it in boiling water.
Then, all the crawling insects spread out all at once, died, and began to ripen.
Looking at the faces of Garyeon and Yeongyeong next to me, I feel like I’m almost crying.
It seemed like he was worried about that from now on, because he had to eat it out of loyalty.
‘I was wondering what kind of weird food my sister would eat today, and it turned out to be fried bamboo and insects in oil?’
But the dish my older sister makes is called Yujakjukchung, and although I don’t know about now, it was a fairly well-known dish in my past life.
It is a dish that is eaten quite a lot in the southern regions of Central China and Yunnan.
If you go to the night market in the southern part of Jungwon, you can’t miss this dish, along with other crickets, spiders, and scorpions.
The bug that Sister Maeng-hee caught is called a bamboo moth larva, and it is known to be very clean because it lives inside bamboo, eating only bamboo sap and bamboo until it becomes a moth.
‘I also bought it once at a night market in my past life.’
A dish so well known that I must have eaten it in my past life.
-Bubbling.
The scent rising from the boiling water is similar to the scent of boiled bamboo shoots.
Since they were creatures that grew up eating only bamboo, the scent of bamboo was what came up from them.
A wok that boils for a short while.
Since I didn’t put in much water to begin with, the water quickly drank away.
When the water had all dried up, Sister Maeng-hee used a ladle to stir the bamboo shoots so they wouldn’t burn.
-Swish, swish! Swish!
“Sister, it looks so delicious. But how did you catch so many insects? It must have been hard to catch them.”
These guys are very hard to find because they are inside bamboo.
The usual way to find these guys is to put your ear to each piece of bamboo and cut it down if you hear them gnawing inside.
When I asked how she found it, my older sister answered with an excited expression.
“Ah, that’s right, let’s have Deokgu and Baekhwa go… take… go, take….”
My older sister answered without thinking when I asked her a question while she was stirring the ladle diligently.
My sister stopped her hand and looked at me with a blank look, tears welling up in her eyes.
And then the next sound is heard.
[You’re so bad! Ah, if you knew, you’d pretend not to know! You know and you’re still teasing me! That’s right! Two, just wait and see! I won’t let you sleep until you ask for forgiveness tonight!]
‘Ugh···.’
It was so much fun teasing my older sister that I ended up making her mad.
My sister announced that she would be staying up all night today.
‘No, Sister, isn’t that too harsh?’
The older sister who warned her husband that she would strangle him for teasing him even a little.
I looked at my sister with bewildered eyes, and she avoided my gaze and stirred the ladle.
-Clang clang.
Somehow, it felt like strength was put into the stirring ladle.
‘I should have done it in moderation…’
I regretted it in my heart, but perhaps it felt too late.
Sister Maeng-hee, who used to try to smile whenever we made eye contact, now doesn’t even look at me.
It seemed like she was really struggling, but my sister’s hand didn’t stop.
Once the water has all dried up and the bamboo shoots have dried to a certain degree, the next step is to pour in the oil.
-Groan groh.
-Chiiik.
As oil poured into the wok, the bamboo shoots were fried in a small amount of oil, releasing a savory aroma.
A fragrant scent mixed with bamboo.
Because they are such thin and small insects, they only take a short time to fry.
My older sister sprinkled salt on the ripened insects, lifted them out onto a colander, and shook off the oil from the insects.
-Whoa. Whack. Whack.
And just like the ones they used to give out on the street in the 80s when you bought pupae, they rolled up small pieces of paper into cones and put insects in them and put them in everyone’s hands.
“Now, everyone, please try it. It’s a Yunnan dish called ‘Yu-jak-ju-chung (stir-fried bamboo insects with oil)’.”
Easy to pack and quick to cook.
Sister, it feels like you’ve prepared more than I thought.
The larvae in my hand looked like French fries.
“Where should we eat? It looks really delicious.”
“joy.”
Just in case I could see it now, I thought that my older sister’s punishment would be reduced, so I grabbed one to eat the first larva, and all I heard was a snorting sound.
I put one of those French fries in my mouth that didn’t disappoint.
-Ouch.
Then a very delicious sound is heard.
The savory insect protein between the salt and oil spread in my mouth, and the fragrant scent of bamboo wafted into my nostrils.
“Mmm… very. delicious.”
At my words that it was delicious, Yeong-yeong and Ga-ryeon, who had been blankly staring at the larvae in their hands, tightly closed their eyes and touched the larvae with their trembling fingers.
I couldn’t even touch the rat, because if I did that, it would seriously damage the loyalty between my wives.
And then he put the insect in his mouth with as much of a smile on his face as possible.
-Ouch.
-Okay, I’m sorry.
Two people with smiling eyes but crooked mouths.
But after their mouths moved a few times, the two of them blinked their eyes and looked at the larvae in their hands with expressions of disbelief.
“Mom, is it delicious?”
“The fragrant scent of bamboo fills your mouth with a rich flavor!”
“No, why is it so delicious?”
“What is this!?”
“This is a real treat! It’s more unique and delicious than anything I’ve ever tasted!”
The opinions of others heard behind them are also delicious.
He quickly shouted towards Biyeon.
“Biyeon. Come here!”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“I can imagine.”
Up until now I had been speaking so that the chef couldn’t hear, but since I had to save my life, I shouted out my imagination loudly so that only those around me could hear.
Soon after, Garyeon and Yeongyeong also expressed the same opinion.
“I can imagine it too. Go go.”
“Teacher, I will also use my imagination.”
Then the wave of imagination follows.
“I imagined it too. Cheongun.”
“I’ll imagine it too. Very much.”
“Of course this is imagination.”
My older sister might become the captain, but so what?
Since living was important to me, I glanced at my sister and saw the corners of her mouth go up.
‘I don’t know how I can fall asleep at dawn.’
I really wanted to live.