Spring is the day to eat wild vegetables, and making small tofu with wild vegetables is a special delicacy every spring. Small tofu, in fact, has nothing to do with tofu. It is made with radish, cabbage, artemisia annua or wild vegetables such as bitter vegetables, cabbage, and thorn vegetables, and boiled with soybean meal or soybean noodles. Originally, it was eaten half dry and half thin when folk life was difficult, but later it was continuously improved by the chef to become a tender and fragrant folk home cooking dish. The hotel also serves fine small tofu, plus egg whites, diced shrimp, diced sea cucumbers, diced meat, etc.
We recruit far away folk, call small tofu "slag", make small tofu, called "rubbing slag". In the past, the most common small tofu was made of radish tassels. Because the radish tassels can be stored for a long time after drying, the dried radish tassels are yellow, and the folk called yellow cabbage. In the spring, when the green and yellow are not picked up, the people often use yellow cabbage to make small tofu.
The most commonly used wild vegetable for making small tofu is cabbage
Of course, the main ingredients for making small tofu are also wild vegetables, and the taste of cabbage is the most delicious, and bitter vegetables are also one of the main ingredients of small tofu with its unique bitter flavor. Of course, there are many ingredients for small tofu, such as cat ears, lantern flowers, car money in early spring, big beard seedlings and wild tomatoes in summer, which are all good ingredients for making small tofu. There are also sweet potato leaves, whether it is dried sweet potato leaves or fresh sweet potato leaves, the small tofu made is very delicious.
In the early years, there was a folk saying in Zhaoyuan called "little tofu with thorny vegetables, poor and poor". 搿, pronounced gé, folk slang, the meaning of friendship, such as "fish to shake fish, shrimp is shrimp, Wang Ba to shake a turtle relatives." "Thorny vegetable is a wild vegetable in the field, the scientific name is thistle, it is edible when it is tender, because the leaves have burrs, and it is slightly large and inedible. In wild vegetables, the time that thorn vegetables can be eaten is extremely short, and the nutrition is worse than that of cabbage, etc., and the folk use more externally to stop bleeding. "Thorny vegetable small tofu, poor and poor", that is to say, using thorny vegetables to make small tofu is a helpless choice, and people have to do it in order to fill their stomachs. Whether it is delicious or not, folk small tofu, in the difficult years of not having enough to eat, how many lives have been saved!
Zhaoyuan belongs to the hilly area, and all kinds of wild vegetables are everywhere on the slopes of the mountains. These wild vegetables are extremely vigorous. If you dig it up, in a few days it will grow again, and the green will be more tender. Speaking of beans, farmers grow the land every family, even if they are a little poorer. Three handfuls of soybeans are ground into a pulp, plus a large pot of wild vegetables, you can make half a pot of small tofu, seven or eight families eat a belly round, maybe there is still a surplus.
Make small tofu
Not to mention that the practice of wild vegetables and small tofu is extremely simple. First of all, the dug up wild vegetables are washed and placed on the cutting board to be finely chopped; then the soybeans that have been soaked in water in advance are put into the mortar, and the pestle head is used to grind into soy milk, which the farmers call tofu foam, or tofu meal. Add water to the tofu meal and boil it in the pot, then add the chopped wild vegetables to the pot, where the waves rise, put it little by little, and try to turn the pot as much as possible so as not to paste the bottom of the pot. Season with salt. In the process of boiling, you will hear the "chirping" in the pot - this may be the reason why the farmer calls making small tofu "wiping slag". Why is it said to be "rubbing"? Because to make small tofu, it is best to put on the sweet potato and radish, and the sweet potato and radish need to be rubbed into silk with a punch.
The land of Zhaoyuan belonged to Laizhou before the Ming Dynasty, and it was only in the ninth year of Ming Hongwu that it was assigned to Dengzhou. Legend has it that before the establishment of the Great Song Dynasty, Zhao Kuangyin once fell to the ground in Laizhou, and on the third day of the fourth month of the lunar calendar, he was very hungry, and when he saw that the door of a peasant family was half open, he wanted to enter the door to beg for food. Unexpectedly, just before arriving at the door, a big white dog screamed and sneaked out, and then out of the house came an old mother with a kind eyebrow, while beating the dog with a crutch, while looking at the people, seeing Zhao Kuangyin hungry and weak, without saying a word, he turned around and took out half a pot of small tofu that he had left for the next meal. Zhao Kuangyin devoured a net light, asked the old mother's surname sun, and thanked him.
Delicious little tofu
After Zhao Kuangyin became the founding emperor, he remembered the small tofu that was so delicious at the beginning, so he ordered the imperial dining room to make small tofu for him to eat, but the small tofu made in the imperial dining room was rough and difficult to swallow, so he killed the second cook and sent someone to Laizhou to summon Mother Sun to the palace. Mother Sun ground the soaked soybeans into a pulp, mixed them with the chopped cabbage, and remade a bowl of small tofu for the emperor. Zhao Kuangyin went up and took a big bite, but he couldn't swallow it. He sighed and said, "Old man, this time I lost my hand." Mother Sun said: "I have eaten such a meal all year round, how can I lose my hand?" Zhao Kuangyin frowned: "Then why doesn't it have the taste of that year?" Mother Sun said slowly, "This is called 'hungry to eat chaff as sweet as honey, full of honey is not sweet'!" Zhao Kuangyin listened thoughtfully, then picked up the small tofu and ate this bitter meal bite by bite.
A year later, Sun's mother passed away in her native country. Zhao Kuangyin ordered Zheng Ziming, a general who was supervising the construction of the East Sea Temple in Laizhou, to build a shrine for his grandmother in the temple. Since then, every year on the third day of April, a grand temple festival will be held here, and every household will eat small tofu!
It's an intriguing legend. It is this most ordinary and economical wild vegetable small tofu that has actually nurtured and saved countless People. During the people's commune period, the production team would also make small tofu with sun-dried yellow cabbage in the spring, and each family would carry a bowl to eat bitter rice.
Now people's living standards have improved rapidly, but small tofu is still a delicacy that people will never forget. However, the practice of small tofu has also kept pace with the times and has been continuously improved. People add more delicious ingredients and ingredients to small tofu, such as putting oil in the pot, frying the pot with green onions, ginger and minced garlic, then adding the right amount of soy sauce, vinegar and other spices, and then adding sweet potato shreds, radish shreds, or spinach and so on. Tofu foam is no longer pure soybeans, when soaking beans, add some peanut rice, and grind them into tofu foam. The small tofu that comes out of this way, the milky white soup, and the green dishes can be described as full of color and flavor, it can be said that the house is full of fragrance before it comes out of the pot, and it is fragrant and sweet and delicious to eat! Let you eat a bowl and want to eat another bowl, if you have not eaten it is a big regret! More exquisitely, some people make seafood tofu, and add egg whites, diced shrimp, diced sea cucumbers, diced meat, etc. to the small tofu, so that the nutrition of the small tofu is richer and the taste is more delicious.
If Zhao Kuangyin was still alive, if he could eat the small tofu made by zhaoyuan people now, it would definitely be as sweet as the one he ate when he was hungry.