Chapter 220: Cooking on a Clay Stove (Part 1)

Chapter 220: Cooking on a Clay Stove (Part 1)
Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
Night fell, and darkness enveloped the entire Chongzhou Shelter that was at the foot of the mountain.
Many people cooked some porridge by boiling the water from the river and occasionally added some pickles for themselves. They could count the amount of grain in their porridge.
Meanwhile, the Tang family set up a table full of dishes.
Fungus stir-fried with peppers, mixed salad, fried eggs with scallions, pickled baby vegetables stir-fried with beans, stir-fried beans, and potatoes… Most of the vegetables were bought by the Tang family before the apocalypse and they were stored in the system’s inventory. Tang Susu also distributed a lot of them to her family’s spatial items.
Especially Mrs. Tang. Whereas others had cluttered spaces, hers were very simple.
One for planting vegetables and the other for storing them.
They also prepared garlic ribs, steamed yellow croaker, braised pork in soy sauce, pork trotters with pickled vegetables, crispy chicken wings, fresh mushroom soup, sweet and sour lemon shrimp, beefsteak with fried apricot mushrooms, and other dishes.
After becoming Metahumans, if they do not replenish using energy cores, their craving for meat would be very shocking. Even if they ate energy cores, they would still want to eat more meat. Other Metahumans would fight non-mutated beasts that hadn’t mutated. Although the meat was hard and bitter, it still had the taste of meat, and that could satisfy their cravings.
The meat that the Tang family had was all high-quality meat that they bought before the apocalypse. At that time, Mrs. Tang almost cleared out the entire seafood market. She even contacted the farms directly. After slaughtering the animals, she then threw them all into the system’s inventory, which caused the inventory to overflow and it needed to have multiple pages just to show the food items. There were so many types that became difficult to pick.
Tang Susu had also allocated a lot of them to their spatial items in case of an emergency.
In addition, the family also cooked a large pot of rice. The rice was steamed together with corn, sweet potatoes, sausages, and a variety of salted meat.
In the past, they ate fresh vegetables and meat every day and never thought of eating salted meat.
But today, when Mrs. Tang was looking for ingredients, she suddenly remembered that she had bought a lot of these things. The benefits of preserved meat were not obvious in the inventory, but once they were taken out, they would be very sought after. They could be conveniently stored and easily carried. They were perfect!
Despite being only two months on from the apocalypse, it was becoming increasingly difficult to source food because of the survivors’ stockpiling them and the food decaying.
Most of them were processed foods with preserving agents. Those can be easily snacked on, but because the human body needed carbohydrates, fat and other nutrients, once the body did not get the required nutrition for a long time, the body would soon deteriorate.
It was already a headache for the Metahumans to think about how to enrich their diet every day. But the ordinary people, who made up almost 95% of the human population, were in a dire food shortage.
To be able to eat three meals without worry was definitely something that would make others envious!
On the other hand, Mrs. Tang had a naive and carefree attitude. She was racking her brain for what to eat every day, how to prepare the dishes, and how to take care of everyone’s diet.
Because of the lack of electricity, each Siheyuan in Chongzhou Shelter was built with a clay stove used in the countryside. There was a large iron pot on top of it, and it could burn some firewood in it. It looked very convenient at the moment.
In the Siheyuan that Mrs. Tang wanted, the clay stoves were all luxurious versions, unlike the other temporary stoves that were shoddily built using baked mud.
The Tang family’s clay stove was not only built with cement but it was also covered with a circle of beautiful and clean tiles.
As soon as Mrs. Tang entered the spacious and bright kitchen, she fell in love with the clay stove. She didn’t even care about others. She quickly rolled up her sleeves, took out a cleaning rag, poured some tap water that she had stored before to remove the rust from the big iron pot, washed it, and then busied herself with making dinner.
Tang Susu came back during this time. She took in the scent and moved to find the source of the scent. Then, she saw that her mother had already washed and cut the vegetables for dinner. There were more than ten kinds of vegetables. Green, red, yellow, black… She also helped out.
Mrs. Tang grew up in the countryside. While she hadn’t used a clay stove for decades, she quickly picked it back up.
Before that, she had told a few people to help her find a pile of dried weeds and dead branches. She also asked someone to cut some firewood and piled them in the corridor outside the kitchen.
While Mrs. Tang was preparing the dishes, the young men rushed to work. They piled up the firewood against the wall and arranged them neatly, almost covering up half the wall. They would have enough to last for ten to fifteen days.
Seeing that they worked so enthusiastically, Mrs. Tang gave each of them a bag of instant noodles, which made them so happy that they could chop firewood for another night..