Chapter 20 Traveling Notes

Fatty and I went to downtown Motuo, entered that shop, and Fatty ordered me a stone pot chicken.

This was what he was so insistent about.

I didn’t know what his intentions were, but Fatty kept insisting that I try it. When the chicken soup was brought over, I knew as soon as I smelled it that Xilaimian had lost.

The chicken soup’s aroma was so strong that it immediately aroused one’s appetite (I never had much of an appetite when in Motuo so I usually didn’t eat much).

Moreover, the chicken soup was very clear. The restaurants here were all about taste and quantity, so they didn’t pay much attention to the food’s appearance. But this chicken soup was very clear. I didn’t believe that we had been given special treatment, which meant that this stone pot chicken soup was this clear as soon as it came out of the pot.

Fatty wanted me to take a bite first but I took a sip of the broth instead—the combination of the medicinal and savory flavors was very special. Generally speaking, the savory flavor came from amino acids, but this palm ginseng’s medicinal flavor enhanced the savoriness so that it tasted very different from how it would south of the Yangtze River.

Hangzhou and Fujian people preferred mild flavors—just boil some shrimp in plain water, add a little bit of vinegar, and you get a savory dish. But if people preferred heavy flavors, then such mild tastes would seem very strange.

This was because in any dish, the savoriness would immediately be pushed to the back as long as there was another flavor.

But this stone pot chicken soup’s medicinal flavor made the savoriness more apparent.

I grabbed another bowl, poured some of the soup into it, and then added a bit of the local mushroom chili sauce. The savoriness was still very strong even with the added spiciness.

Delicious!

I took a bite of the chicken, which shredded apart so easily that after chewing it three times, it dissolved into the chicken broth still in my mouth. As the savoriness exploded on my taste buds, I found myself practically salivating.

I looked at Fatty and Fatty looked at me, “Are we done for?”

If all the stone pot chickens sold in the chilled bags here tasted like this, then Xilaimian really couldn’t compete.

“These people have real skills,” I said to Fatty. “What else can we do? This must be the best Motuo stone pot chicken in the world.”

“What’s the difference between this chicken and what we make?” Fatty took another bite, feeling very confused. “Why is the flavor so different, so…strong?”

I looked at the ingredients in the soup and found that it was similar to what we made in Fujian, except for the chicken. This was Tibetan chicken, not Fujian chicken, but using different chicken shouldn’t affect the flavor this much.

The proprietress had a special secret recipe.

When Fatty looked at me again, I said to him, “That’s somebody’s intellectual property. You’re not Plankton⁽¹⁾; you can’t steal their secret recipe.”

“I can be different from her,” Fatty said, “but Xilaimian can’t lose. This is our main dish.”

I took another sip of the stone pot chicken soup—it really was delicious—and then turned my head and looked at the wall. There were some photos hanging there from when a Tibetan TV station came to interview the shop. In fact, if you paid careful attention to the flavors, you would realize that the soup contained sheep’s bone marrow, but the flavor was very light and there was no smell at all.

Truthfully, this did stress me out a little bit. I ate all the chicken, drank all the soup, and then returned to the temple with that savory flavor still lingering in my mouth. Back at the temple, the three of us gathered around the stove and began to ponder over the problem.

Fatty was very worried. Poker-Face had eaten dinner in the dining hall while we were gone. I wondered if he talked with that Deren about the missing gold, but I didn’t bother mentioning it. In short, everyone was in a daze as they sat down and warmed themselves by the stove.

In the end, we couldn’t come up with any solutions to these problems. The time for the competition was quickly approaching. We knew that if we didn’t go to Kangbaluo, it would be too late, so we set off for Kangbaluo the very next day.

After it snowed, the road was very difficult to walk so we had no other choice but to take the long way and hike through the snowy mountains. Sometimes we’d enter valleys that weren’t covered in snow while other times we’d go above the snow line.

I took a lot of photos. The three of us were sometimes half a kilometer away from each other, but we weren’t worried. At night, we would sleep in a tent. In the past, such trips always had an end destination, but this time, we were just passing by. As we got closer, blue-robed Tibetans came out to pick us up.

It’s too inconvenient to describe the whole reception process, but during this period of time, I noticed that Kangbaluo’s food had the same savoriness as that proprietress’s stone pot chicken. The blue-robed Tibetans gave me two sheep and two Tibetan chickens and said to me, “Go to the 96K Nature Reserve, rent a piece of land, and raise a bunch of snails and slugs. There are a lot of fireflies there. Since there are so many snails, the area is full of firefly larvae. If the Tibetan chickens eat those firefly larvae, they’ll have that unique flavor.”

Although I didn’t know what else the proprietress put in the soup, the blue-robed Tibetans said that the savory flavor could definitely be brought out in this way.

While we were there, the blue-robed Tibetans sparred with Poker-Face, but it felt like I didn’t see a thing at all.

My eyes couldn’t keep up with their movements, but this kind of sparring was more like a performance, one which could be classified as banquet entertainment. I didn’t think they were using their full strength, but I had also drunk a lot that day.

When the blue-robed Tibetans sent us on our way, they followed us for a long time.

And just like that, before we knew it, our journey to Motuo gradually came to an end.

Fatty’s next stop was Agui’s house. He said that there might be fewer chances to go later so he wanted to stay for a month.

Guangxi was not like Motuo. When traveling in Motuo, no matter how relaxed your journey was, there was a huge paradoxical atmosphere of tranquility and coldness coexisting together.

Traveling in Guangxi, however, was very easy and we didn’t need to do anything. Of course, before I went there, I still had a snail farm to build and a competition to take part in.

<Chapter 19><Table of Contents><Chapter 21>

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TN Notes:

(1) This is a reference to Plankton from Spongebob. His main goal is to steal Krabs’ secret formula for Krabby Patties and running Mr. Krabs out of business. Info here.

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o(TヘTo) My last day of freedom before I have to go back to work tomorrow. Kill me now. Sorry for the lack of updates, had a lot going on last week and I decided to be selfish and catch up on some personal reading I’ve been putting off for ages. I’ll try to do better with the updates from now on but eh, life happens. Til next time~~

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Pic added 12/3/2022 (fan translation courtesy of me).