【Food · Stuffed with gourmet risotto snacks】
In Yinchuan, Ningxia, which is stuffed with jiangnan, there is a very ordinary and popular snack - braised snacks.
The name braised snack is actually a bit misleading for people who don't know much about Northwest Food. The "snack" in braised snacks is not a snack that is different from a large meal in the ordinary sense. The "snack" here is itself a kind of food unique to the Northwest Hui Ghetto.
"Snacks" are meat fillings sandwiched between two large dough skins, cut into diamond-shaped pieces that are one inch square and half finger thick, and fried to make tender food on the outside, which can be eaten immediately and can also be used as an ingredient for large stews. As the name suggests, braised snacks are a kind of food made in the form of "snacks" as the main ingredient and stewed.
The method of making braised snacks is to boil the broth in a small pot and add "snacks", meatballs (there are also unapproved), yellow cauliflower, black fungus, vermicelli, green vegetables and other main ingredients. Sprinkle with chopped garlic and coriander before eating, and spicy eaters can also add spicy seeds in oil, accompanied by fennel cakes unique to the Northwest Region. Hot and hot, soup and water, it can be the choice of morning meal, and it can also be used as a meal.
Braised snacks are originally eaten by Hui compatriots in the northwest region, and the meat is halal. With the development of ethnic integration, the Han residents in the northwest region also began to love this way of eating, and expanded the meat of the Meat to the meat of Han cuisine. The first time I was exposed to this delicacy, I ate a Chinese-style braised snack.
One day in the early 1970s, my brother Biao Biao and I went to the Hanmin Snack Department at the intersection of Limin Street and Jiefang West Street in Yinchuan and sold two bowls of braised snacks for Biao Biao's grandmother in a small pot. Along the way, we took turns carrying the steaming pot and carefully walked home, but we were already hungry by the aroma of the pot. Back at Biao Biao's house, Grandma ate a bowl and blessed me and Biao Biao with a bowl. This was the first time I'd eaten a braised snack, and its mellow flavor is still indescribable.
From the first time I ate a Chinese-style braised snack, I often remembered and dreamed about it. However, the living conditions of the half-pound meat and three or two oil eras were impossible to eat regularly. But this thought has always hooked the worm in my body and has never been far away. Years later, when I first ate halal braised snacks, it was already when I was preparing to go to school in Xi'an after the college entrance examination. Unexpectedly, the taste of halal braised snacks is better than that of Han. Since then, whenever I return my money on holidays, I will always go to the halal restaurant in the Sita Market, which I think is the most delicious, and eat a painful meal to anoint and kiss.
In recent years, whenever I return to my hometown, I still don't forget to look for authentic braised snack restaurants, but because I am no longer shy in my pockets and my taste for hungry insects is getting higher, I have developed to add "snacks" to lamb stew...
Some people say that people's eating habits are determined from the age of five or six years old, and they will not change for a lifetime. This is true. Today, before lunch, when there was a slight sense of hunger, I did not think of any other delicious northern and southern meals, and I was the first to think of the snacks in my hometown - braised snacks.
Although the hometown is thousands of miles away, the food of the hometown can only be eaten in dreams, but writing this short text can also slightly reduce the pain of homesickness and talk about homesickness.
Books in the Feast