1275 Cooking New Dishes
Even if they just helped Qiao Mei with these odd jobs every day, they would still get a salary of 30 dollars a month. It was money that they could not even earn in three months! It seemed that Xia Zhe had not lied to them. It was not a dream to earn more than 100 dollars a month!

“Thank you, sister-in-law!” the three of them said in unison.

Qiao Mei suddenly seemed to have thought of something. She called Huang Xu over and asked, “Elder Brother Huang, I understand that you know how to slaughter pigs?”

“Yes, I have done that in our village for a while,” Huang Xu said honestly.

“I want to get some pig offal or something similar. Elder Brother Huang, do you think you can help me get some? There are farmers raising pigs near the suburbs, but I don’t know how to go about doing this,” Qiao Mei said with a troubled expression.

“No problem. Tell me what you need and I’ll do it for you,” Huang Xu said as he patted his chest.

Qiao Mei wrote down everything she wanted on a piece of paper. She would be glad if he could just help her get a few things on the list. After all, Huang Xu was still unfamiliar with the capital and it would be very difficult for him to get his hands on everything she wanted.

The next afternoon, Huang Xu brought his “spoils of war” to Qiao Mei’s house. He got her everything she had listed down on that piece of paper, including pork liver, pig’s head, pig’s large and small intestines and pig’s heart.
“Elder Brother Huang, how did you do it?” Qiao Mei said as she looked at the pig offal in the courtyard in shock.

People who slaughtered pigs knew the base price for these things and how to obtain them. As long as they went to the village to ask if there were any families who knew how to slaughter pigs, it was basically easy to solve the problem. The three of them had to go to four villages before they managed to collect everything, so it was not solely Huang Xu’s efforts alone.

“Come into the house to take a rest! Elder Brother Huang, you must be exhausted!” Qiao Mei said.

“I’m fine, but sister-in-law, why do you need these things?” Huang Xu asked curiously.

Xia Zhe was from a prominent family so they should be able to afford meat. These pig offal were usually kept aside for those families who could not afford meat. What was Qiao Mei doing not using the good cuts of meat, but asking for such meat that was hard to handle?

“I just want to try making some new dishes!” Qiao Mei said embarrassedly.

So she wanted to cook delicious food for Brother Xia! This fellow Xia Zhe was really lucky. He married such a beautiful wife who not only knew how to do business, but she was also diligent and thrifty. She was really a rare find!

However, their own wives were also not too bad. Each of them had her own merits!

When Li Gui heard voices in the front yard, she came over to take a look. When she saw the pig offal, she was also a little shocked. However, Qiao Mei surely had her reasons for wanting these things, so she did not ask further.

Qiao Mei looked at both the large and small intestines in the basin and started to feel worried. In her other life, the large and small intestines she bought were ready-to-use ingredients which had already been cleaned up and processed. She had never seen the large and small intestines in their original state and still with feces in them. For a moment, she did not know how to start.

What if the intestines burst open when she cut them on both ends… then the entire courtyard would be ruined…

Li Gui smiled happily when she saw Qiao Mei rooted to the spot. She had yet to see anything that Qiao Mei did not know how to handle! She did not expect Qiao Mei, who seemed to know everything, to be worried over something.

“Let me handle these things. You can go and deal with the rest,” Li Gui said.

“These things are very dirty. Mom, do you know how to do it? If there’s really no other way, let’s find someone to come and do it,” Qiao Mei said with a frown.

“Don’t worry, I know how to do this,” Li Gui said.

In the village, whenever pigs were slaughtered, all these parts of the pigs were like treasures. Basically, all the women in the village knew how to handle these pig offal. It was a piece of cake to them.

Qiao Mei looked at the remaining parts and continued to feel worried. It was really difficult to clean them. Qiao Mei decided to ask Mao Hang for help and he did not take long to clean up everything.

Satisfied, she went to the kitchen to mix a special sauce. Currently, the only seasonings that could be bought in the market were salt, peppercorn and star anise. She still needed to go to the Chinese medicine shop to buy the rest of what she needed.

Qiao Mei did not buy too much. She still did not know if she would succeed in making it! She could only try the combinations one by one and let everyone judge which sauce was the most delicious.

At night, more than 10 dishes appeared on the dining table. There were stir-fried pig intestines in sauce, stir-fried pig intestines with capers, pig’s heart soup, and so on. Every dish was made from pig offal.