Chapter 265: The Theme Of Summer Vacation
As everyone knows, the closer it gets to vacation, the less students can focus on studying.
This natural law still applies to all school students even 30,000 years later.
In the last week of this semester, more and more students have been wandering over to the A Bite of China Club Small Restaurant in the afternoon. Some clubs even had their club president personally lead people to pack takeaway and go back, looking anything but like they were preparing to continue club activities.
Fortunately, the school is quite open-minded. To reduce the crowd pressure at the A Bite of China Club Small Restaurant, they specially approved the school cafeteria to provide takeaway service to students in the afternoons of the last week, including staple foods with less soup like buns, steamed buns, pan-fried dumplings, steamed dumplings, as well as recently authorized french fries, potato wedges, and other deep-fried snack items from the Yue Xiang Group.
After Xiang Chuan learned about this, she muttered at home, “Eating such big buns in the afternoon—aren’t they afraid of stuffing people? Can’t they make the buns smaller?” Xiang Weiguo overheard it.
Two days later, diners discovered that whether it was the cafeterias at various universities or the Yue Xiang Restaurants around the area, they all started offering smaller-sized buns, only as big as a baby’s fist, just like the big buns with thin skin and plenty of filling, but priced at only one-third of the big buns.
This delighted many diners with smaller appetites. They were very tempted by the various buns at Yue Xiang Restaurant, but those buns were as big as an adult’s fist, and after eating one or two, it was hard to eat a third. These small buns solved that problem. Diners could select several flavors of small buns at once, one bite of a different taste, even eating them like opening blind boxes for fun.
But these are all later stories.
——
At this moment, Xiang Chuan moved over a chair and sat in front of the roaster, staring blankly at the roaster emitting the aroma of baked bread.
If you listened carefully, you could also smell some meaty aroma mixed in with the bread scent. Led by Class President Lu Daiqing, the gluttons from Class Eight were swallowing hard, staring fixedly at the roaster.
“Do you all need to crowd around like this?” Ouyang Yating looked helplessly at her classmates standing nearby. “We’re not holding a roasted meat party today.”
“Don’t be so rigid, Yating. Xiang Chuan is using the roaster right now, so since it’s already lit, wouldn’t it be a waste not to roast some other things while we’re at it?”
Nancy chuckled and sidled over, holding a disposable bowl filled with eggs and beef from the previous round of roasting.
Ouyang Yating shot her an annoyed glance, picked up the chopsticks from the bowl, and popped a piece of meat into her own mouth, tacitly agreeing with Nancy’s statement.
Just then, the timer ringtone on the roaster sounded. Ainuo operated the roaster’s control device, lowered the heat, and opened the roaster door. A thick aroma of meat and bread hit them in the face, making Liang Gong, who was preparing to use the shovel to take out the baking pan, swallow hard.
This beef was bought by the Class Eight crowd pooling their money together a few days ago when Xiang Chuan mentioned preparing to roast some things in the roaster. The pure lean meat part was put into the roaster for sealed roasting, while the marbled beef belly, at Xiang Chuan’s insistence, was switched to direct pan-frying on the iron plate.
The marinated lean meat went into the roaster together with the dough Xiang Chuan had kneaded, and they were coming out together now.
First out was Xiang Chuan’s bread. Her cheeks twitched as she looked at the black dumpling in front of her. She put on heat-resistant gloves, weighed the obviously over-burnt bread in her hand.
Compared to the previous one she made, this time at least it wasn’t completely burnt; the bottom still had some snow-white and golden parts. But as for whether it was edible… Xiang Chuan, the picky ancient person with a sensitive tongue, would rather gnaw on buns.
Compared to the depressed Xiang Chuan, the Class Eight Grade One crowd who got the roasted lean beef were much happier. The lean meat, marinated with salt and pepper, became a very tasty hand-torn snack after sealed roasting. Class President Lu Daiqing led the class cadres using the compressed laser cutter to evenly divide the large piece of meat into thirty portions, each about the size of a bamboo tube when distributed to the classmates.
The students who got the meat some started tearing and gnawing right away, while others put some in takeaway boxes to take home and eat while watching Xiang Xue’s TV series live stream that evening.
The A Bite of China Club members who didn’t participate in pooling money for the meat managed to mooch a few bites from their classmates.
Right now, only Xiang Chuan had little mood to pay attention to these things.
“So, it failed again this time?”
Ainuo came over to Xiang Chuan’s side with his disposable bowl, and Liang Gong followed closely behind. The two looked at the dough in front of Xiang Chuan that was 90% carbonized, their faces full of indescribable expressions.
“It’s a bit better than before.” Xiang Chuan unwillingly showed the two the bottom of this black unidentified object.
“It’s only a bit better.” Ouyang Yating, sitting next to Xiang Chuan, reached out and took the black object, digging out the white parts. “The unburnt portion is about 10% of the total volume. For food made from wheat flour, the edible conversion rate is quite low.”
Xiang Chuan slumped dejectedly in the chair, tilting her head back, sighing: “Sigh… if only we had an oven. No matter what, an oven should at least be able to bake the bread into proper shape…”
“But right now, there’s no necessity for ‘must use an oven.'” Ainuo looked at the Class Eight crowd roasting meat on the iron plate. “The roasted chicken, roasted beef, roasted eggs, and roasted vegetables we’ve made so far are all very popular, but for these ingredients, ‘roasting’ as an edible processing method isn’t essential. Whether it’s Yue Xiang Restaurant or the cafeteria, they mostly provide stir-fried, steamed, and boiled preparations. Even your current carbonized prototype made from wheat flour can use other edible processing methods; roasting isn’t the only technique.”
“That’s the downside of missing history.” Xiang Chuan wrinkled her face looking at him. “Clearly, roasting is the most primitive cooking method for humans, yet in the modern era, it’s the most restricted. It’s upside down. People in ancient times enriched their diets with baked flatbread, roasted meat, baked bread, while buns and steamed buns came later.”
“Doesn’t that mean the ‘roasting’ method was gradually abandoned by people as time developed?” Liang Gong added.
“But bread, cake, pizza, and such are still mainstream foods in the 21st century; they just don’t fit Asian dietary habits.” Xiang Chuan said, sighing deeply, looking resentfully at the roaster. “If I’d known, I should’ve started with bread and such. Now I’ve come up with so many recipes, making the Agriculture Bureau and Cultural Affairs Bureau think roasted foods aren’t important, so now we have to fight wits and courage with this thing.”
“We? Xiang Chuan, do you mean…?”
Ouyang Yating and Ainuo looked at her with complicated expressions.
“The theme of the summer vacation Outdoor Study is it.” Xiang Chuan thumbed at the carbonized object in Ouyang Yating’s hand. She chuckled looking at her three club members. “I can’t be the only one racking my brains over this thing. This is a big project. If we get it right, there’ll be way more things to eat in the future.”
A Bite of China Club trio: No, we’re already quite content now. Eating carbonized objects… is entirely unnecessary.
But club members have no right to protest in club activities, so in the end, they could only watch as they helped Xiang Chuan submit the A Bite of China Club’s summer vacation Outdoor Study application.
