Chinese Version 03-29-2025
Today is Saturday. In the morning, my son told me that he and his wife, Zelene, planned to come over for dinner around 5:30 PM. Zelene wanted millet porridge and my son wanted Korean-style fried rice noodles.
After taking an afternoon nap, I got up to make dinner. I started cooking the millet porridge first, since it would take more than two hours. Then I started to make lemonade, one of my son’s favorite drinks. Last year I squeezed out some lemon juice and froze it to save as lemon juice ice cubes, but there was only enough to make three glasses of lemonade. I knew from last week that this was not enough lemonade so I went to the backyard to pick a big lemon and came home and rinsed it. I looked at the lemon, which was bigger than my fist, and wondered how to squeeze the juice? After all, my manual juice squeezer can only hold lemons that are up to the size of an egg. I suddenly remembered that when I went to my college roommate, Ping’s house for dinner in big Boston in Massachusetts, I often saw her patting and pressing whole lemons with the skin on and then cutting and squeezing the juice directly. I put the big lemon on the cutting board and turned it while patting it. After a while, the hard lemon became soft. I held the lemon with both hands and squeezed until the juice came out from a hole I had cut into a large bowl. When I saw that some pulp was squeezed out, I felt that I patted the lemon too hard. After squeezing out most of the juice, I cut the lemon into half and scooped out more pulp into the large bowl, then added sugar and boiling water to make a large porcelain jar of lemonade.
It took too much time to make the lemonade today. When they arrived, I had only cooked the twice-cooked pork belly, the rice noodles and rice were not yet cooked.
I rarely cook fried rice noodles so I didn’t have a good sense of how many ingredients to use. The raw materials I prepared such as minced beef, rice noodles soaked in water, chopped carrots and onions were too much for tonight’s dinner.
While stir-frying the rice noodles, I said to them: “Yesterday, one of my high school alumni who came back from Seattle gave me a box of Qingtuan. Do you want to try it?” Zelene replied: “Is your friend from Shanghai? As Shanghai people like to eat Qingtuan.” I said: “No, she is from Sichuan just like me. I haven’t eaten Qingtuan before.” Zelene said: “Let’s try it together.” After the stir-fried rice noodles was ready, the children set the dinner table with bowls, chopsticks and napkins. Before starting our dinner, I followed the instructions given by my friend: “Remove the plastic wrap, steam in a pot, and let it cool before eating.” I steamed two Qingtuan that had a filling of red beans and black sesame for dessert.
There were only two dishes tonight: twice-cooked pork belly and stir-fried rice noodles (with minced beef, green vegetables, bean sprouts, red onions, and carrots). Zelene had millet porridge, my son and I had the leftover rice. I passed the porcelain jar of lemonade to my son and said: “The lemonade is made of fresh lemons with less sugar, drink it first. If it’s not enough, there are three more glasses of lemonade made from frozen lemon juice with more sugar.”
After taking a few sips of fresh lemonade, my son said: “It’s not sweet, it tastes good.” Zelene also took a few sips and said: “This lemonade is not sweet or bitter, it tastes good.” I laughed and said: “It means our lemons in the backyard are of high quality!” My son quickly finished the jar of lemonade. I took out a glass of sweeter lemonade from the oven for him but he noticed an ant floating in the glass and didn’t want to drink it. I took out the remaining two glasses of lemonade from the oven for my son. Fortunately, there were no ants in them, so he quickly finished them.
When we finish our dinner, the Qingtuan were finished steaming and had cooled for a while. Zelene cut the red bean filling Qingtuan into three portions of different sizes. She ate the smallest portion and my son ate the largest portion. They both said it was delicious. I liked it too. I then cut the black sesame filling Qingtuan into four portions. Zelene and I each had one portion, and my son ate two portions. Although my memory is not as good as before, I hope the scene of eating Qingtuan for the first time and the story behind it will stay with me forever.
Later, my daughter sent a text message from Shandong saying that her babies just woke up and wanted to see their grandmother. I quickly opened FaceTime and saw my daughter’s family and her in-laws were in the car ready to go out. After my son and Zelene greeted their niece and nephew, my daughter asked me to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for my granddaughter Sue. After singing the song, I greeted my grandson Ben, whose arms were full with various stickers, and said hello to Ben’s Nainai, then hung up in a hurry. Although the time was short, it was also the high point of the night. My son listened to me singing and whispered to Zelene: “Look how happy she is!”
I was really happy to see and chat with my daughter’s family from a distance via FaceTime while having dinner and chatting with my son and daughter-in-law.
There was some millet porridge and twice-cooked pork belly left over from tonight, they will be my lunch tomorrow. I plan to stir-fry the remaining ingredients that were originally prepared for fried rice noodles with the leftover twice-cooked pork belly as a dish with the leftover millet porridge.