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Text: Wang Fuhai
As the snow season faded away, the weather became colder. Before dinner, the smell of sweet potato porridge wafted from the kitchen, which made me can't help but go back to my childhood, recalling the sweet potato porridge that my mother squatted in front of the stove to cook for us in the winter when the snow closed the door.
In my childhood memory, my family was still relatively poor, the grain harvest was not enough to eat, every winter and spring had to wait for the state to sell grain, often cut off, especially in the green and yellow season is also the most serious period of grain shortage. At that time, in order to solve the problem of food and clothing, in addition to planting a small amount of wheat, soybeans, millet, and sorghum in the production team, the largest area was sweet potatoes. Just after the Spring Festival, the production team let experienced people burn kang seedlings, and after the fifteenth day of the first month, they put on the cattle plough sweet potato ditch, and organized male and female laborers to plant the potato seedlings in the nursery on the ploughed ridges, which is called spring sweet potatoes. My hometown is located in the old road of Dashahe, especially suitable for planting sweet potatoes, red skin white sweet potatoes are long and smooth, and after cooking, they are sweet and sweet, especially delicious. Therefore, every year in the sweet potato harvest season, the production team organized the members to go down to the field to plane sweet potatoes every day, and then weighed the dividends in the field according to the number of earned workers, some households divided hundreds of pounds, some thousands of pounds of sweet potatoes, some cut into potato chips in the field to dry, some were transported home by board truck to hide in the kiln, and some washed the sweet potatoes and beat them into potato pulp with a crusher, separated the starch, dried the flour face and used the winter leisure season to process vermicelli, and the remaining potato residue, second pulp and other scraps became the main food for people to spend their hunger in the spring. At that time, every household dug a sweet potato cellar in the winter, because so many sweet potatoes could not be eaten for a while, put in the yard to pile up for fear of freezing, sweet potatoes are most afraid of freezing, once frozen, it is not good to eat, hard and hard to eat can not be cooked, eating into the mouth is bitter and astringent. If you leave it in the courtyard for a long time, it will also grow dark spots or rot. Therefore, before the sweet potatoes enter the cellar, the scarred potato blocks are picked out, and the intact sweet potatoes are stored in the cellar, because the cellar is constantly kept fresh and the storage time is long, and it can be stored until the second year before the wheat harvest is not rotten or bad, and the spots do not deteriorate.
At that time, when the production team organized the members to plan the sweet potatoes, they were paid according to the ridge, and some people only wanted speed, and the sweet potatoes left next to the ridge did not care, so that there were sweet potatoes that "slipped through the net". Every Sunday, my mother told me to weave a basket with white strips of white wax, take a small scratch hook, and go down to the ground to plan the sweet potatoes. Sometimes with good luck, you can plan one or twenty pounds in one morning. However, shaved sweet potatoes also have tricks, generally on the ground, the edge of the ditch is a place where people are easy to overlook, and there are more sweet potatoes that "slip through the net". When I was on my way home with a basket full of sweet potatoes, singing and laughing with my friends and going home, I didn't mention how happy I was!
In the winter agricultural leisure season, the family rations are seriously insufficient, in order to continue to eat, most of our rural families are two meals a day, each meal is mainly to drink sweet potato porridge. Sometimes, when I was so hungry that I couldn't sleep at night, my mother coaxed me to say, "Man is a mill, and when he lies down, he is not hungry." "Comforted by my mother, I fell asleep hungry...
In my childhood memories, my mother's sweet potato porridge was so delicious. When boiling porridge, peel and cut the sweet potatoes into small pieces, put them in the pot to cook, when the water in the pot is boiling, and then add the right amount of millet, and later when people cook sweet potato porridge, most of them are corn grits. After the water is boiled, it is necessary to use a spoon to mix in the pot while boiling, one to prevent the bottom of the pot, and the other to prevent the porridge soup from overflowing the pot, so that in about five or six minutes, the sweet potato porridge will be boiled, and after coming out of the pot, drink it to the mouth sticky, slippery, sweet and delicious. Another advantage of drinking sweet potato porridge in winter is that it is slow to cool down, and drinking a bowl of sweet potato porridge suddenly warms up. As the saying goes: you can't drink sweet potato porridge in a hurry. The sweet potato porridge that has just been put into the bowl is particularly hot, and when I pick up the bowl, I drink it and burn my lips, and some of it is hot with tears. Therefore, when drinking sweet potato porridge, you should slow down and swallow carefully and not be anxious.
The past is hard to look back on. At present, the snow festival has passed, and it will soon enter the cold winter when people in their hometown drink sweet potato porridge. I miss my childhood and have long been tired of eating chicken and duck fish on the table. In order to improve their eating habits, the family often bought sweet potatoes, mixed with some corn grits, and boiled sweet potato porridge for dinner. However, whether it is red or purple, the sweet potato porridge that comes out of the boil, when drunk into the mouth, always feels that there is no taste of the sweet potato porridge of childhood...
Times are advancing, and people's living standards are improving. However, I still miss the innocent childhood, and I still miss the original sweet potato porridge of childhood!
About author:Wang Fuhai, male, member of the Communist Party of China, college culture, retired public security police. He was a soldier and engaged in news and propaganda work in the border guard barracks. After returning to his hometown, he put on a police uniform, engaged in secretarial propaganda work for a long time, and published several works in the central mainstream media and the Henan Provincial CPC Committee's "Spring and Autumn for the Elderly", "Shangqiu Daily", "Beijing-Kowloon Evening News", "Beijing-Kowloon Literature", and Hunan "Happy Old Man Daily". He is currently a member of the Henan Shangqiu Association.
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