dkrc Chapter 5 Lamb Noodles
Chapter 5 Lamb Noodles
The visitors were Lu Hua and Lu Jie, the sons of Lu Yuan's uncle.
Lu Changming was the third child in his family, with two older brothers and two younger sisters.
In the Lu family, only the eldest uncle's family has a tractor. When other families need to haul grain, Lu Hua and Lu Jie will drive over in their tractors to help.
The younger generation had grown up together and had a very good relationship. Seeing Lu Yuan slumped on the grain pile, Lu Hua joked:
"Oh, the chef's doing the work himself?"
Lu Yuan stood up and moved aside from the pile of grain: "If you serve the chef well today, I guarantee you'll have your mouths gleaming with oil!"
"Don't worry, Chef!"
Lu Hua spoke in a high-pitched, non-standard Mandarin, which made everyone burst into laughter.
Lu Hua and Lu Jie then started helping load the truck, while Lu Yuan went back inside to change into clean clothes and prepare to cook.
He's really not good at farm work anymore, so it's more important for him to take good care of everyone's stomachs.
Upon arriving in the kitchen, I lit a fire as usual.
With yesterday's experience, ignition was much faster today.
After lighting the fire, knead the dough a few more times and then start cutting the side dishes.
There was still some lamb leg left from yesterday, so Lu Yuan removed the meat and cut it all into small cubes about 1 centimeter in size.
The side dishes include potatoes, radishes, and tofu, all diced.
Lu Yuan took out a few more tomatoes, chopped them up, and set them aside. People from the northern region usually add tomatoes when they eat noodles.
Firstly, it adds a reddish hue, making the soup base look more appetizing; secondly, it adds a refreshing aroma, making the overall flavor richer.
Heat oil in a wok, then add diced lamb and stir-fry quickly.
After the fatty meat shrinks and turns brownish-red, add a generous amount of chopped scallions and stir-fry.
Next, add chili powder, seasoned noodles, and soy sauce, and stir-fry quickly.
Once the lamb turns a reddish color, add diced potatoes and diced radish and stir-fry.
After stir-frying evenly, add chopped tomatoes and stir-fry until they become mushy. Add plenty of water and then add diced tofu.
Finally, add an appropriate amount of salt, and once the soup boils, sprinkle with chopped green onions before serving.
If there were broth, the flavor would be even better, but for now Lu Yuan can only use water instead.
Taking advantage of this break, Lu Yuan began rolling out the dough.
First, flatten the dough with a rolling pin, then slowly roll it up onto the rolling pin starting from one end.
When rolling, you need to push outwards with your palm, pushing once for each layer. This process is called rolling out dough.
Repeat this process once, and the dough will become a huge sheet of dough.
At this point, you need to sprinkle a layer of dry flour on the dough to prevent it from sticking together when cutting.
Then lift the dough from one end and stack it up layer by layer like waves.
After the meat sauce soup is cooked, set it aside and start a new pot of water.
While the water is boiling, the stacked dough can be cut.
Lu Yuan's knife was fast and steady, and he quickly cut the dough into noodles of uniform thickness.
After the water boiled, Lu Yuan grabbed a handful of noodles, shook off the dry flour, and threw them into the pot.
While he was making noodles, he took out two more sauerkrauts and made a cold sauerkraut salad, which was very refreshing to eat with the noodles.
Cooking noodles in a large pot is very fast; they're basically cooked when they float to the surface.
Lu Yuan used his chopsticks to scoop up a mouthful of noodles from the pot and put it into a large bowl.
Then scoop a large spoonful of mutton sauce and pour it over the noodles, and an enticing aroma will instantly fill the air.
After Lu Hua and Lu Jie finished loading the car, they rushed into the kitchen, drawn by the aroma: "Chef, you made noodles with minced meat sauce?"
Lu Yuan pointed to the noodles served on the stove and joked, "Help yourself, the chef doesn't serve the food."
"How could I possibly trouble you!"
Lu Hua and Lu Jie carried the noodles to the front hall, laughing and joking. Lu Yuan also brought out the cold pickled cabbage salad and then went to the yard to invite his parents to come and eat.
Lu Hua and Lu Jie had eaten Lu Yuan's cooking before, and they felt it was just so-so, ordinary, home-style cooking.
But this bowl of noodles with minced meat sauce has a distinctly otherworldly feel to it.
Plump diced lamb, paired with golden potato cubes, green radish cubes, pure white tofu cubes, bright green scallions and cilantro, creates a vibrant and lively dish with contrasting colors.
In addition, the bright red chili oil floating on the soup noodles creates a warm and shiny layer, arousing an irresistible appetite.
Lu Hua picked up a mouthful of noodles with his chopsticks. The steam rose up, and the aroma wafted straight into his nose. The soup was thick but not cloudy, and every noodle was coated with the broth. It was oily but not greasy, with a bright red color, a refreshing green color, and a meaty fragrance.
Snort, sniff, sniff!
By the time Lu Yuan returned to the restaurant from the courtyard, Lu Hua and Lu Jie were already waiting at the door with empty bowls in hand.
"Wait, where's the noodles?" Lu Yuan looked at the two clean, empty bowls, wondering what they meant.
"Chef, another bowl of noodles, please!"
"Chef, it's urgent!"
"What? You two finished it all? Aren't you afraid of getting burned?" Lu Yuan finally realized that they had already finished eating the noodles.
Fortunately, Lu Yuan had plenty of noodles, so he immediately went back to the kitchen to refill the noodles for the two brothers.
But his speed was clearly not as fast as the two guys eating noodles!
So Lu Yuan turned into a ruthless noodle-making machine, cooking all the hand-pulled noodles wasn't enough, so he added a handful of dried noodles before he was done.
An hour later, Lu Hua patted his belly and smacked his lips, saying, "Xiao Yuan, you should sell noodles from now on. You'll definitely drive Wang Facai next door out of business!"
Lu Jie burped and chimed in, "Yeah! I wouldn't trade this bowl of noodles for a wife!"
Lu Hua chuckled and slapped Lu Jie on the head: "You son of a bitch, are you planning to take the postgraduate entrance exam? All you can say is rhyme!"
Wei Yinghong, who was standing nearby, had also eaten two bowls of noodles. She thought her son's noodle-making skills were even better than the old aunties who helped with cooking in the village, and she chimed in with encouragement:
"Yeah, Xiao Yuan, how about we sell noodles?"
Amidst the expectant gazes of the crowd, Lu Yuan firmly shook his head: "I won't sell noodles; that stuff doesn't make much money."
"How could they not make money? Ma's Beef Noodles in town sells for 2 yuan a bowl, and I heard they sell 500 bowls a day. Goodness, that's 1000 yuan!"
Lu Jie brought up the example of Ma Ji Beef Noodles, and the others immediately nodded in agreement.
Ma Ji Beef Noodles is so famous that everyone in the surrounding villages knows it. On market days, it's so crowded that you can't even squeeze in to eat there.
Jinling Town serves as a distribution center for the surrounding villages, allowing them to conduct business in large volumes. After all, a large number of villagers go to the town to make purchases every day, and buses to the city can only stop in the town.
Shops along national highways don't have these advantages. Compared to shops in towns, they have absolutely no chance of attracting customers. Selling low-priced, high-frequency products would be suicide.
But explaining these principles to them was quite difficult, so Lu Yuan had to find another way to explain them:
"Let me do the math and you'll understand. A bowl of noodles with minced meat sauce sells for 3 yuan, so we make 2 yuan profit. A pound of lamb sells for 25 yuan, so we make 15 yuan profit. Our area along the national highway isn't like a town; the customers are only there during mealtimes, so we definitely have to sell the most profitable dishes!"
The logic is actually quite simple: within the same time frame, a higher average order value will definitely generate more profit.
None of them were stupid; they understood the logic immediately. Wei Yinghong stopped worrying about it and called Lu Hua and Lu Jie to go to the grain station to sell grain.
Lu Yuan didn't go with them; he wouldn't be of much help anyway, and he had a lot of preparations to do.
During this time, Lu Hua and Lu Jie came to pick up grain three more times. They watched Lu Yuan busy outside the restaurant and busy inside the kitchen.
As evening approached, after they finally finished selling the grain and returned, they found several white frames and an earthen stove on the open ground outside the restaurant.
Lu Yuan's family restaurant is called Xiao Lu Farmhouse Cuisine, a name that Lu Yuan copied from restaurants in the provincial capital.
The restaurant has more than 300 square meters of open space away from National Highway 109. During mealtimes, customers park their cars in the open space, which makes it look messy.
So Lu Yuan marked out a few parking spaces so that the cars would be parked neatly and wouldn't block the restaurant's entrance.
It also gives people a very professional feeling, and professionalism means a certain degree of credibility, which can indirectly guide passersby to dine there.
After Lu Yuan explained the parking spaces, Lu Hua curiously pointed to the earthen stove by the door and asked, "Chef, what's this?"
"This is a secret weapon!" Lu Yuan smiled mysteriously. "By the way, Brother Hua, take the tractor with us tomorrow, let's go to town to buy some things!"
"Okay! Tomorrow is the big market day in Jinling Town. I'll talk to Yingying and Xiaoxue too, and we can all go have some fun tomorrow."
(Lamb and minced meat noodles)