Ruyue Essay: "Mother and Daughter on the Yellow Earth" Potato Eggs in Gansu (2)

Gansu potato eggs are edible but not dry. I picked two pig urine bubbles and was sweating. There were potato eggs boiled in the pot, sheep dung eggs burned under the pot, and a dead old man lying on the kang, covered with a ragged felt, waiting to eat the potato eggs. This is a scolding for us Gansu people.

Gansu is the hometown of potatoes, which are also known as potatoes and potatoes. Therefore, the people here are accustomed to calling potatoes potato, which is a staple food that people cannot live without. Only by eating it will they have the strength to work. Without potatoes as a condiment, the common people's meals seemed to consist of noodles.

As a serious Gansu native, I feel that Gansu people are very capable of enduring hardship, especially when doing physical work. It is not an exaggeration to describe them as honest and honest. No matter where they are, they have a strong drive. This is also a habit of working hard and not complaining that they have developed since childhood.

Under difficult living conditions, villagers must eat to have the strength to work. Because you have to do physical work during the day, if you don’t have enough to eat, the work will be put on hold. Strangely enough, although potatoes are often eaten all year round, no one gets tired of them and even eat them as a staple food for three meals.

A bowl of sauerkraut, a pot of boiled potatoes and a few green onions is a meal. The villagers are not very particular about their three meals a day, as long as they can fill their stomachs, so potatoes have become the simplest daily meal for everyone. You can live without a vegetable leaf all year round, but you can't live without potatoes. Potatoes and noodles have become the best partners, appearing inseparably on the dining table of every household every day.

In my memory, every meal at home is inseparable from potatoes. They are boiled, fried, roasted and eaten all the time. What I miss the most is the potato slices baked on the lid of the coal stove in the school classroom. The students took turns bringing their own potatoes to school to roast and eat. Especially during the break after class, everyone gathered around the stove. First, they peeled the clean potatoes with a pencil sharpener, then cut them into even thin slices, and began to bake them on the hot countertop. When both sides are browned, everyone rushes to eat it. The taste is really tempting. Sometimes I feel that no amount of food is enough, so I bake it at home after coming home from school.

Potatoes have become the only way for farmers to make money. Children’s school fees are saved by selling potatoes. Because Dingxi City is a famous potato-producing place, almost every household grows several acres of potatoes, so the annual National Day holiday is the best time for the whole family to dig potatoes. Parents will wait for their children to dig potatoes during the holidays, hoping to take advantage of this holiday to quickly harvest the potatoes in the fields.

Later, I went to school elsewhere and spent less time at home, but my parents still insisted on growing potatoes to maintain the family's livelihood. It can be said that potatoes feed the villagers, and they have made students in the mountains successful one after another, allowing them to go to distant places with their dreams.

Every time I eat potatoes, I always think of my parents and everything on the yellow earth. Potatoes have become a delicacy that we will never tire of. Nowadays, the humble potatoes have left the mountains and come to more distant places. I really hope they will go further.

Although my hometown is very poor, potatoes make the villagers proud. Potatoes feed people, and at the same time they add a little splendor to everyone’s lives. In the days to come, I hope that potatoes will always be with my fellow villagers, and that ordinary days will become more and more exciting.