Chapter 337 - 336: The Dish Is Not the Problem
Lady Zhang must have repeated this countless times, and the family’s grandparents also constantly complained, complaining that they didn’t know how to flock to where benefits lay. Qi Congming knew this well and had explained that he wasn’t unwilling to join in the fun, but rather that he couldn’t break into that circle with his younger brother following him. However, every time he said this, the adults at home seemed not to hear him, and they would still use the same words to blame him next time. He silently followed his mother back, listening to his younger brother Congwu curse Qi Sanshun along with their mother. "Mom, you don’t know, Brother Sanshun is just a bad egg, even though he’s our own brother. When he gets good stuff, he never gives us a little more. When I tried to take some myself, he scolded me and wouldn’t include me in his games."
Lady Zhang had heard this type of complaint from Qi Congwu many times before. She agreed with her son. Qi Sanshun, Congwen, and Congwu were brothers from the same family. When there were good things, of course they should first be given to one’s own brothers before sharing with others. Wasn’t that natural?
"Mom knows, Qi Sanshun just can’t distinguish between kin and others. Let’s ignore him; tomorrow we’ll complain to Great Uncle," Lady Zhang said as she led her two children back to their own courtyard in the Qi Family Residence.
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Jinrong said that the dinner for the twenty-ninth day of the Chinese New Year should just be a simple meal, but no one dared to serve him just that.
After having a simple lunch on the twenty-ninth, Nanny Li, Nanny Jin, and Anshun’s Household started to bustle about preparing dinner.
Although the dinner was not as grand as the one on the evening of the thirtieth, it still consisted of six hot dishes, four cold platters, and a soup.
The Qi family’s days were now comfortable, with plenty of meat, eggs, and poultry, and many rare food ingredients sent by Jinrong, so preparing New Year dishes commonly seen on the festival, such as braised pork, Four Happiness Meatballs, braised ribs, and the like wasn’t a problem.
Beyond meat dishes, they also needed to pair with some vegetable dishes. In this era, there were not many off-season vegetables; apart from cabbage, radish, potatoes stored for the winter, there were dried beans, dried vegetables, mushrooms, and such from the villagers’ summer stocks.