Hidden Walk (134) Air-dried beef cooked at home
At the request of a friend, I came to her house tonight to eat air-dried beef.
My friend's family lives north of the town, and it's just a corner away from the city. Her family is Duzhuangzi, and she came down from the road all the way to the east, and encountered a path leading to the yard. The house is nestled in a grove of fruit trees, and although spring has not yet arrived, you can feel that when the spring flowers are blooming, the unique scenery here must be beautiful, and you already like it when you look outside. The entrance door is the door, after entering, the house is laid out in the east and west, the living room is in the center, and you can see a small covered yard through the dining room, stacked with some coal blocks and sundries, which is the most ideal place to cultivate the mind.
These friends who got together are classmates who regained their old wives thirty years ago, and they began to meet each other a year ago, and they had the basis of the classmates of thirty years ago, and they soon became hot, so everyone was very casual after entering the house, some learned to play the piano, and some went to ** like me to find tea. My friend knew that I loved tea, so I brewed a pot of "little green oranges" and drank it, listening to the women talk about how they played crazy when they were young.
After everyone arrives, the dishes are served, and the host's family makes cold dishes, and they are two plates of one dish, so it looks very hearty. The main dish was air-dried beef filled with a large tea tray, and the host took out a quick knife and quickly cut the bone-in meat into small slices, and everyone couldn't wait to start tasting it. I picked up a piece of fat meat and put it in my mouth to chew, and the thick aroma of beef filled my mouth, and there was no strange smell accumulated because it was air-dried meat, and the fragrance could not be dissipated for a long time.
The speed at which the owner cuts meat is a little too fast to keep up with the speed at which everyone eats meat, because even women who don't usually eat fatty or smelly meat like to eat this unique beef. Fortunately, there is a lot of meat, and everyone has a thirst for delicious food in their eyes and mouths, and the stomach gradually surrenders in front of the powerful meat. Then the host came up with a tea tray of potatoes and carrots boiled in broth, covered with several wide noodles, which turned out to be the famous "three sets of air-dried beef" in Xinjiang, and the wide noodles were boiled in broth. The original way to eat it was to cover the sliced meat on a plate with vegetables, and then eat the vegetables while eating the meat, and occasionally have some noodles, which is definitely a delicacy. And the host family thought that we did not have the boldness and appetite of the herdsmen, so they first brought out the meat and ate it to their heart's content.
After a lot of air-dried beef is eaten, the cold dishes and noodles that taste equally good can only be tasted on the tip of the teeth, and at this moment I realize that I no longer have the amount of food I had when I was young.
I asked the origin of these meats, it turned out that my friend's husband lives in Burjin County, Xinjiang, which is not far from Kanas Lake, and there are mountainous pastoral areas around, and my friend's husband will find an "empty cow" to give to herdsmen and friends to raise after going up every year, and then pull back to top dressing for 50 days in October every year, and kill it at the end of the year to make air-dried beef. The recipe is as simple as sprinkling salted beef with salt, then hanging it in a cool place to dry. Before the Spring Festival, he would drive back with beef and other abundant ingredients from there, and this is the air-dried meat we eat today.
When I was drinking, my friend's husband served another plate of dried fish, which was said to be wild fish, not very large, but delicious, with a heavy taste of fish, which was thousands of miles different from the fish we usually eat, and it was considered a superb snack as an appetizer.
The wine is also good, it is the "toast" produced by the Yumen Toasting Distillery, which belongs to the strong fragrance type, with a faint burnt taste, which is generally the characteristic of local wine, but the entrance is sweet and the aftertaste lasts. At this time, the air-dried meat that I had eaten seemed to have been consumed a little, and when I ate another slice, it seemed to be different from the previous one, and it was very alcoholic, and together with that small dish of fish, it became a classic of appetizers.
The next time you eat air-dried beef, it may be next year's Spring Festival.