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The next morning, as expected, Lao Fan came knocking on the door to scrounge for food again.

Lin Yuan was no longer surprised by it, but she did find it odd that Xia Zheng hadn’t come along.

Upon asking Liuzi, she found out that the guy had actually taken her story about the "fruit pomegranate" seriously and had been pondering and studying it all night.

He was still up with panda eyes, grafting plants in the backyard!

Lin Yuan felt somewhat speechless and also a bit embarrassed. After pondering for a long time, she still instructed Liuzi to tell Xia Zheng, after returning, that she had been joking and the thing might not even exist.

While eating donkey rolling on the ground that he had scrounged from the kitchen, Lao Fan hummed twice, "Let that stinky kid tinker on! Giving him something to do so he won’t come to bother me!"

Lin Yuan pursed her lips and entered the kitchen, but her curiosity about the relationship between Lao Fan and Xia Zheng was piqued.

Lao Fan claimed he had never married, and there was no blood relation between them.

Yet from her perspective, even though they were not related, they acted as if they were closer than family.

Lao Fan professed disdain for Xia Zheng, but he always seemed concerned about him.

Even Xia Zheng, who repeatedly threatened to expose Lao Fan in Zhuma Town, never actually went through with it.

After Lao Fan left to give Lin Jiaxin acupuncture, Lin Yuan took out the rice milk she had prepared the day before.

After grinding the rice milk the previous night, she had strained it through a fine cheesecloth and let it drain in a basin overnight.

By now, it had turned into a slightly moist, soft rice dough ball.

All that was left was to steam it until cooked.

After the rice dough ball had been steamed, it was essentially ready to use, but Lin Yuan felt it wasn’t enough.

The dough ball lacked elasticity and wouldn’t taste good when chewed, so she pounded it with a rolling pin on a board, gradually turning the rice dough into a sticky and elastic rice cake.

Since there were children and elderly in the house, Lin Yuan chose not to cut the rice cakes into the usual thin, long strips but into small slices instead. That way, when fried later, both the young and old foodies wouldn’t end up with a bellyache from overeating.

Frying the rice cakes was quite simple: without Korean chili paste, she had to make do with chili peppers.

She first boiled the rice cake slices in water until soft, then cooled them in cold water.

Rice cakes are quite resilient to cooking, so to make them look stickier, she boiled them a bit longer than necessary.

Then she fried them with chili peppers and the greens Liuzi had brought her.

While cooking, Lin Yuan recalled the vegetables she had planted in the garden. Recently, she had been busy with mooncakes and tofu and hadn’t had time to check the progress of her plants. But counting the days, these vegetables should have grown quite a bit.

The afternoon’s spicy stir-fried rice cakes and sour and spicy julienned potatoes had satisfied Lao Fan, who was accustomed to exotic delicacies.

Rubbing his stuffed belly, he savored the flavors, "These potatoes are really good, it’s surprising.

Who would have thought that the poisonous beans that stinky kid brought back by mistake could turn into something so delicious!

Tsk tsk, girl, with your cooking skills, if you ever make it to the capital, you’d definitely make all those Capital City Officials bow before your kitchen knife!

And those Imperial Chefs, haha, I’d love to see their jaws drop! "

To Lin Yuan, going to the Capital City and dealing with Capital City Officials were things she had never even considered, especially being an Imperial Chef, those are people who cook for the Emperor himself!

But Lao Fan talked as casually about it as if he were commenting on how delicious the potatoes at lunch had been. Who exactly was this old man?

In the afternoon, Lin Yuan went to check on her vegetable patch, and sure enough, the vegetables had grown nicely, just not as quickly due to the poor quality of the soil in the area. The radish sprouts were tall, now it was only a question of whether the radishes underground were big and plump.