Chapter 701 - 644: The Abandoned Bloody Garment
The next day.
Jiang Yuan cooped up at home, making zongzi with the villagers.
In Jiang Village, the meat-filled zongzi are the specialty, boasting generous portions of both meat and filling, with meticulously selected rice. Overall, they’re rather tasty. Especially the newly wrapped meat zongzi, once freshly boiled, they’re truly fragrant and rich in flavor.
Compared to the northern zongzi, renowned for their light and refreshing taste, southern-style zongzi tend to pursue a more complex flavor profile. In this respect, there seems to be a reversal of characteristics between the north and the south.
Moreover, some of the elderly in the village also make plain alkali zongzi, similar in content to the pure rice zongzi of the north but with a slight salty taste and no sugar added, looking like lustrous white jade; pure with the fragrance of rice. These alkali zongzi taste the best when they’re just out of the pot, sometimes even outshining meat zongzi, but once stored, their quality drops significantly, requiring a particularly skilled hand to make.
With the same ingredients and exact same wrapping and steaming method, the zongzi made by a few grandmothers taste exceptionally sweet and aromatic, a bit magical when you think about it.
Even Jiang Yuan can only enjoy these alkali zongzi during specific times of the year. Past those days, even if the village grandmothers were willing to make them, the taste just wouldn’t be the same, and their stored counterparts couldn’t even be discussed in the same breath.
After having his fill at home, when it was time to work, Jiang Yuan and the folks from Jiang Fuzhen loaded a pickup truck full of zongzi and headed back to the criminal police brigade’s office, distributing them to the members of both the Investigations Unit and Jiang Yuan’s Accumulated Case Team.
The officers were all pleased, and Jiang Fuzhen was even happier, saying, "Your team is really great, if you want to gift something, you can actually give it away. In our village, there are so few people, and exchanging gifts among each other is no fun at all."
"Next time you have extra beef from slaughtering a cow, send some over to us," Jiang Yuan had no intention of saving for his father.