What kind of homesickness is it to miss the food in your hometown?

People often say that they are homesick and miss the mountains and rivers in their hometown, but no one knows that missing the food in their hometown is a deep homesickness. The unique food in hometown may not be eaten in other cities, and even if there is, it is not an authentic hometown flavor. It is an unforgettable thought and feeling to miss the delicious food in my hometown. In fact, I also miss the delicious food in my hometown, that is, baked sweet potatoes, which I will never forget.

In my childhood memory, sweet potato was an essential meal every day. In the rural areas in the 1970s, almost every household had to eat sweet potatoes for every meal, especially for breakfast. Once the pot was opened, the steaming sweet potatoes were already mouth-watering. The sweet potatoes just out of the pot were still a little hot in their hands and sweet in their mouths. A dish of sweet potatoes, three times five divided by two, was solved by a family.

The sweet potatoes in my hometown are usually planted after harvesting wheat, which is called wheat stubble sweet potato. To plant sweet potatoes, you should first raise seedlings. One or two months before planting, you should make a rectangular bed in the open space, take the sweet potatoes out of the cellar and pick out the moldy ones. Then, put the sweet potato with clean appearance flat on the bed, fill the bed, cover it with a layer of fine soil, and then insert it into the bed. After about 15-20 days, the sweet potato will germinate and then gradually grow leaves. When the leaves cover the bed, the plastic sheet will be lifted to dry. When planting, the sweet potato seedlings are pulled down from the sweet potato pond, and the pulled sweet potato seedlings are as long and thick as leeks. When pulling out sweet potato seedlings, pull out the lush ones for the first time, and the remaining small ones will continue to grow until the next planting.

When pulling sweet potato seedlings, a group of children often come to join in the fun, huddle around adults, and grab a few trees with their small hands and pull them hard. Sometimes even the sweet potatoes are taken out, and they are always scolded by adults and go to play aside.

After planting sweet potato seedlings, there is basically no management. When local sweet potato seedlings grow all over the ground, it is necessary to turn over the seedlings several times, because after the sweet potato seedlings grow all over the ground, many fibrous roots will grow in the branches, which will affect the growth of underground sweet potato. At this time, these sweet potato seedlings with fibrous roots are gently separated from the ground by hand and transferred to the other side for growth.

Sweet potatoes after wheat stubble are usually excavated after the first frost. After the first frost, the growth of sweet potato basically stopped, and the leaves turned black after frost. Some farmers picked up the frosted sweet potato leaves, dried them, bagged them, and put them in pots for tasting in winter. The sweet potato just harvested is not delicious. If you want to bask in the sun for a while, it tastes soft and sweet. However, after the sweet potatoes were dug out, some of them were scraped into dried sweet potatoes when they were fresh. Dried sweet potatoes are easy to preserve and can be ground into flour to make nests. Sweet potato and dried sweet potato almost became the staple food in the countryside at that time, supporting a family. At that time, sweet potatoes were grown without chemical fertilizer and pesticides, and a few cars of farmyard manure were used at most. So in retrospect, sweet potatoes were particularly sweet at that time, and now sweet potatoes can't eat that taste. Although there are many varieties of sweet potatoes now, there are no banana sweet potatoes, high starch sweet potatoes and red meat sweet potatoes. You can taste it at that time.

Although childhood life is very bitter, the memory left by sweet potato is unforgettable. Dried sweet potatoes are processed into flour, which can be used to make steamed buns. At that time, every household ate sweet potato steamed buns, and the economic conditions were better. But the sweet potato noodles are mixed with some bean noodles or sorghum noodles. Sweet potato noodles can only be made into nests. Biting them in your mouth is black and sticky, and tastes like My Sweetie. After playing for a long time, the children were hungry, so they ran home, took out Wowotou from the basket, grabbed a handful of salt from the salt jar, put it in Wowotou, poured a few drops of sesame oil, broke a nest with their hands, and ate it with salt and sesame oil. This is a delicious meal.

Or pulverizing sweet potato, and filtering with fine reed to obtain sweet potato powder. After drying, filter the sweet potato powder until it is as fine as flour. Then add hot water and alum to make vermicelli. The dried vermicelli can be preserved for a long time, and can be fried with Chinese cabbage and radish on weekdays, or cooked in mutton soup, which is especially delicious.

Sweet potato, spent my childhood with me. I grew up eating sweet potatoes and sweet potato buns, and I have an indissoluble bond with sweet potatoes. Now that people are well off, sweet potatoes are no longer the staple food of rural people. There are fewer and fewer people growing sweet potatoes. However, I still like to eat sweet potatoes and miss the taste of sweet potatoes when I was a child. This is my sweet potato feeling.

It has been many years since I left my hometown, but the smell is unforgettable. That smells like home.