Chapter 693: Being Taken Away By a Pig (1/2)
Hou Xiaoliang followed her orders exactly and swiftly went back and forth. He let the line loose and then pulled it quickly back as he dragged the struggling fish right and left.
“Avoid pushing it head on and use its strength against it. Think of it as borrowing the opponent’s force to easily push aside a thousand catties. If you do it correctly, the fish will not be able to escape and we will be able to catch it!” Yu Xiaocao noticed that her two audience members were listening attentively, so she elaborated on her strategy.
At this time, over half of that large fish’s energy had been used up. Xiaocao hinted at Hou Xiaoliang that it was time to reel it in. He had a serious look on his face as he gripped the fishing pole tightly before carefully bringing it up. They could first see the fish’s head peeking through the water, followed by its body. What a specimen! From its head alone, one could tell that this fish weighed at least thirty catties. As its body left the water and it was brought up on deck, the people onboard could see that this was a large fish that was at least two meters long. It struggled heavily on the ship.
“Has this fish become aware ah?” Zhu Junyang asked in a slightly judgmental manner.
The little divine stone glared at him. Would an aware fish be so stupid to get caught by a baited fishing hook? This was merely a stupid and dumb large fish!
“Little Glutinous Dumpling, come back here now! You might get injured by that fish’s tail!” Wutong held onto its tail and brought it back into her arms, “Do you want to eat fish? You can eat after it’s cooked at noon. Don’t worry, we caught a lot today so you definitely have a share!!”
That gargantuan fish continued to struggle mightily on deck, as if it was trying to protest one last time that it didn't want to die. Its tail slapped the ship, making a ‘pah pah’ sound. From time to time, it would try to leap up and then fall heavily back down.
The ship’s coxswain heard the noise and ran over, “Wow! What a big sturgeon. It must be at least fifty catties, right? It’s not that I'm trying to brag but my wife is a good hand at cooking sturgeon. If Your Highnesses don’t disdain it, I can have my wife cook this sturgeon for you.”
Xiaocao only knew how to prepare the most commonly eaten types of fish. As for sturgeon and other rare fish, they looked to be much too high class and she didn’t want to damage such good ingredients!
They had quite a good haul today, so the fish feast for lunch was incredibly beautiful and delicious. There was fresh steamed bighead carp, sweet and sour river carp, exploding garlic fish, Sichuan poached fish in chili sauce, pine nut fish, fish ball soup...the vast majority of the dishes were made by Xiaocao and the cook maids in the ship.
As for the coxswain’s wife, she was truly a good cook who showed her experience in living on the water. The methods she used for cooking the sturgeon opened Xiaocao’s and the imperial prince’s cook maid’s eyes on new methods. With one sturgeon fish, she was able to come up with six different dishes: chopped peppers with sturgeon belly meat, spicy pickled vegetables with sturgeon fillets, spicy roasted sturgeon, light fried sturgeon fish fillets, sturgeon fish head with black bean sauce, and black pepper sturgeon steaks. Every dish was incredibly fragrant and delicious, and not a single person could stop eating after tasting them.
In the end, Xiaocao and the two men, as well as Official Wu, ate until they couldn’t bend over anymore. With their servants helping them, they strolled back and forth on the deck to help aid in digestion. There was still quite a bit of food leftover from their fish feast, so all of their subordinates benefitted from this. Hou Xiaoliang rubbed his protruding little belly and let out a burp. He sighed happily at Wutong, “In this lifetime, my greatest fortune was being able to serve Imperial Prince Xu as I’ve been able to eat so many delicious delicacies. This life was truly worth it!”
“Just look at you! Looks like this lifetime will only be used to stuff that silly face of yours!” Wutong rolled her eyes at him and stealthily popped a digestive pill into her mouth. The lavish fish banquet today was truly too delicious. She, who usually had an iron self-control, had also been unable to resist the temptation to stuff herself. That wouldn’t do! In the future, no matter how scrumptious the food looked, she needed to restrain herself. Otherwise, with such a mistress who loved coming up with new dishes, she’d become so fat that she’d be unable to walk anymore!
Hou Xiaoliang snickered and said, “Think of the commoners; don’t they spend their entire lives working in order to bring food to the mouths of their families? We now live in a good era as the common people at least have enough food to fill their stomachs. If we were still living in the past dynasty, as soon as a natural disaster came by, there’d be starving people everywhere with corpses lining the road…”
“Go go go! You say it so realistically and scarily as if you had personally experienced it!” Wutong glared at him and roundly scolded him.
Hou Xiaoliang saw that she didn’t believe him and became a bit agitated, “Believe me! I’ve heard those elders who have lived many years talk about it before. Before the end of the past dynasty, the imperial court was greedy and avaricious while the officials were corrupt. One year, the Huai River had massive flooding and commoners living at the banks of the river became homeless and destitute. The court barely just managed to scrape some relief funds together, but the local officials in the area took a greedy bite for their share and ended up absconding off with more than half of it...it was said that in some areas, there wasn’t a single living person left in a village. The people died of drowning or starvation. Vultures circled in the air above the disaster zone as they waited for the starving people to take their last breath before they swooped down to enjoy a delicious feast…”
“Ugh...can you choose a different term besides ‘delicious feast’ to describe this? You’re doing this on purpose, right? Do you still want people to be able to enjoy food in the future?”
Wutong pinched Hou Xiaoliang’s arm. He was truly a bit dumb and was nothing like his master! Imperial Prince Xu treated his princess consort incredibly well, as if she was a precious treasure that needed to be coddled and protected at all times. Didn’t they say that a certain type of master would have a certain type of servant ah? How come she couldn’t sense a whiff of similarity between these two ah?
“Alright alright, it was my bad, my bad! Wutong, have you made a decision yet? When will you consent to marry me? I’m already twenty-three years old and my family is starting to fret from impatience. If I hadn’t vehemently refused, my parents would have already made an engagement between me and some other maiden!” Hou Xiaoliang was also impatient now. Many of his childhood friends already had kids old enough to go out to the store to buy soy sauce on their own, yet he hadn’t even married a wife.
Last time, when he saw one of his good friends, he felt quite battered afterwards. Argh, other people had no problems marrying their wives. He, on the other hand, had such a difficult time!