The little lady in the dining room

Chapter 11 Stewed Pears
Sydney thought, since the crab-stuffed orange is convenient because it is convenient to eat the crab meat in the middle without digging out the "shell" next to it, then it is enough to make pears stewed with rock sugar like this!
After peeling the skin and cutting off the "cover", Xue Li used a knife to stroke the white cut surface for a long time, and finally stabbed it only two minutes away from the edge.

Unlike the pitting just now, this time because the distance to the edge is too close, the knife will stab out if you are not careful, which makes Sydney very nervous.

Even his breathing was slow and slow, and he relaxed a little after carefully stroking around, and then sliced ​​and took out the inner parts bit by bit.

Then take a new pear.

Also peel off the pear skin, and then cut off the pear flesh from each side with a knife. The place near the core in the middle is cut squarely, and there is still a lot of flesh.

However, depending on the local acid of the core, this part cannot be used.Xueli put the core aside, thinking about how to cut the best-tasting pulp in front of him.

Sydney originally wanted to dig into small balls one inch in size, and Bai Yingying's handful of small balls must look good in the whole pear.But on the one hand, the process is cumbersome and there is a lot of waste, so the few tribute pears may not be enough; on the other hand, the round shape is more inconvenient to eat. If it is a ball in a soup, it is easy to fish, but if it is filled like this In a handful, it is difficult to scoop up with a porcelain spoon, and it is easy to fall off with chopsticks.

She is good at cutting shreds.Shredded pears are also not acceptable. The pears are too soft and waxy after being soaked in rock sugar, and they will break when you pinch them, which is more embarrassing than a ball.

Slicing also has this problem, so it has to be diced.

Because the parts that rely on nuclear partial acid cannot be used, the four pieces of pear meat are not much at all.After dicing, the corners were too thin and irregular to be used. Sydney hesitated for a while and had to cut another one.

Fill the whole pear with a layer of diced pears and a layer of rock sugar. The diced pears are about six pieces of pear meat, which is one and a half.

After filling it out, Xue Li breathed a sigh of relief: In this way, a serving of two, plus the whole pears outside, requires a total of five, and Gongli is just enough.

Cover the lid, put it in a porcelain plate, put it in the steamer, and wait for another half an hour.

When it was brought out of the pot, before Xue Li put down the plate, Su Zixian couldn't wait to pick up the stem on the "lid".When the rock sugar melted, those small white cubes were a bit shorter than when they were filled in. They were angular and wrapped in syrup, which looked very attractive!

Stretch out their chopsticks to pick it up, and use their strength, the softness and hardness are moderate and will not be broken.

Put it in the mouth for tasting, the sweetness of rock sugar is suitable, and the pear fragrance is well preserved.

"Is it okay?" She blinked and asked Su Zixian, Su Zixian nodded heavily: "Very good!"

Sydney didn't know what others had prepared.

It seems that because Su Zixian asked about Qiao Xuanyi's preferences but refused to tell, Jiang Yuyao and Bai Ji who shared the same room were very unhappy, especially Jiang Yuyao, who always had a very obvious expression when seeing Su Zixian.

The day for the female officials to taste the meal first in order to choose is set on August [-]th.

Excluding the ten who were promoted first, 62 people prepared meals at the same time that day, and the three largest dining rooms in Shangshi Bureau were all opened.Every room is busy, the heat and the stove fire reflect each other, but the tension among the girls can't be dissipated.

The young maids who had just entered the palace had finished practicing the rules, and when they had free time, they couldn't help but look outside the three windows, tiptoe to see what their familiar sisters were doing, and then they couldn't help but sigh that they were "so amazing".

Near You, after all the meals submitted to the palaces were prepared, the busyness of these three meals also came to an end.

Everyone went to the main hall in Shangshi Bureau neatly.The ladies in the palace don't have much opportunity to hold a banquet, so the main hall is used for two purposes: one is to gather here when there is something to call everyone to listen to, and the other is to gather here when there is a competition like this, so the main hall has been built very large, and at this time it is in front of everyone. In the tension, it is set off to be extraordinarily solemn.

The 62 people lined up in six rows, with the middle envoy in front and the young envoy behind, with a small case in front of each.There is also a round stool beside me, but no one dares to sit on it.

Sydney was in the rightmost position in the third row, watching the female food official and the four chefs come towards her after tasting the dishes prepared by the 12 people in front, and her whole body tensed up nervously.

I don't know if it will work...

There are only five tribute pears left, so she had to use ordinary pears for today's test meal.Although it took some brains to do it, it was still very simple.

Only pears and rock sugar.

The five female officials stopped in front of them, Zou Shangshi looked at the two white pears on the porcelain plate in front of him, and asked softly, "What are they?"

"Stewed pears in rock sugar." Xueli replied, quickly took a pair of clean chopsticks from the table and offered them to her, her heart pounding like a few deer and rabbits dancing.

Looking at Shang Shi's expression, she took the initiative to pick up the pear stem, and Fang Xiaoding appeared inside, and Shang Shi smiled when she heard it: "I also thought that this girl brought up a whole pear, and I don't know how to eat it."

The four chefs also laughed in agreement, and the atmosphere became a little more relaxed.

Xue Li put her hands in front of her body, her fingers in her sleeves were twisting and twisting, her voice couldn't stop being weak: "The servant girl is also afraid that the ordinary method of sliced ​​and stewed pears will not look good at the banquet, and it is inconvenient to remove the core of the whole pear and directly fill it with rock sugar. "

She paused, gritted her teeth and said, "That's why I came up with the female officer's method of making oranges stuffed with crab."

Zou Shangshi gave a "hmm", held a piece of chopsticks to taste, and the four chefs also took a piece of chopsticks to taste each.

Sydney's heartstrings became tighter and tighter, and she felt almost out of breath, and she waited for her evaluation with her ears pricked up.

Zou Shangshi asked her: "Which female history are you?"

"The maidservant belongs to Cui Nushi." Xue Li replied immediately.

Hearing Zou Shangshi's "hmm" again, they all put down their chopsticks and walked towards the next little maid.

Didn't hear any reviews...

The 62 dishes were tasted in less than two minutes. Except for three or four people who cooked too unpleasantly, and the female officer reprimanded them plainly, none of the rest were sure how well they cooked.

Back in the room, the three companions who seemed to have lost their souls made Su Zixian very awkward.

"Your cooking is delicious!" Su Zixian sat on the edge of the couch and dryly opened Xue Li, who was listlessly lying on the couch, jumping out word by word: "But, wish, let's..."

After skipping three characters, she took a deep breath, raised her eyes, and sat up, pulling Su Zixian, frowning: "Isn't it too simple? The ladies are all used to stewed pears in rock sugar, right? Am I Should I use sweet-scented osmanthus?"

Su Zixian looked at her in embarrassment, not knowing what to say.

After Shangshi and the chefs agreed on the specific meal list, they told the waiter to write it down.Then the guards on duty went to these little maids to make preparations, and every time they knocked on the door of a room, they had to face the uneasiness of the girls.

When they came to the room in Sydney, the waiters were all used to it.Avoiding the expectant eyes of the three, the person holding Qiao Xuanyi's menu cleared his throat: "Jiang Yuyao's emerald shrimp dumplings, go get the ingredients on the [-]th."

Jiang Yuyao's complexion brightened immediately, and she suppressed her excitement and said "No".

The waiter Dian flipped the paper in his hand, and found the next dish: "Ruan Xueli's stewed pears in rock sugar."

"No!" Xueli couldn't help answering first, Dian waiter glanced at her, and said: "Go to Cui Nushi to get the plate before doing it."

"No." She replied again, knowing that she was a little disrespectful, she bowed with a reddish face.

A group of people left.

The three looked at Bai Ji at the same time while sucking in the air-conditioning. After each of them froze for a while, they coaxed her all night.

On the day of Mid-Autumn Festival, the female officials got up earlier, so before Xue Li went to find Cui Wan, Cui Wan had already sent her the porcelain plate for meal preparation.

It is a small rectangular dish with an inch high on the outer edge.The inside is a light cyan color common to porcelain, while the outside glaze is a bright pear yellow, with a clear boundary between yellow and white at the edge.The matching porcelain spoon has the same color of yellow on the outside and white on the inside. The whole set looks simple and delicate.

Sydney looks left and right, the more you look at it, the more beautiful this set of porcelain is, and the more you think about the way the peeled white pears are put in and the juice is stewed, the mouth is watering...

"That's promising!" Cui Wan sneered and told her with a straight face, "Be careful. It's the first time to present something to the banquet, so don't make any mistakes."

Sydney is of course very careful.

There are only five gong pears in total, and if they are broken, they cannot be redone!
Her method is simple and quick to do.When it was completed, there was still half an hour before the palace banquet started, so it was still placed in the pot and simmered slowly over a low fire to prevent it from cooling down.

Most of the palace banquets are the work of the Shangyi Bureau, and they are not required to serve them.The Shangshi Bureau will only be short of a dozen regular seventh-rank servants waiting in various places in the hall, in case anyone wants to order something on a whim, and the Shangyi Bureau may not be able to remember the request.

The task of observing whether the three low-ranking concubines liked the dishes made by the little maids also fell to these selection servants.So after the meal was served out of the Shangshi Bureau gate, the windows of the residences of the little maids were opened in unison. The girls sat by the window and looked in the direction of the gate, waiting eagerly for their return to report to the maids.

I really don't know how...

Sydney lay on the window sill as if she had settled down.

At Qiao Xuanyi's table, except for a few difficult main dishes that were prepared by the older maids, other small stir-fries, soups, and desserts were all prepared by them, there were nearly twenty dishes.

I don’t know if she will like the stewed pear with rock sugar, or even if she will taste it—Xue Li has always known that, whether it is a banquet or a normal meal, most of the dishes are untouchable. To get into the noble population, you have to get into the eyes of the noble people first, so the dishes of the Shangshi Bureau are getting more and more beautiful.

"Come... come!" There was a shout of surprise from the south, and everyone in each house looked over, commotion.

It was only when they saw that the selected servants came back with palace lanterns that they realized that it was completely dark.

He wanted to run out to hold them and ask them first, but no one dared to do so, so he could only watch them pass by in front of him, until he walked to the door at the top of the courtyard, which was Zou Shangshi's residence. .

Under the attention of everyone, the door of the room was pushed open, and several servants entered the room and quickly closed the door.

The candlelight that had just been reflected was blocked in an instant, and the courtyard was quiet.

(End of this chapter)