Takeout food is indeed the wisdom of modern people's lives. However, when we slowly wash the grains of soil off the vegetables, the fragrant details of life will also flow along the clear water at our fingertips.

Wang Zengqi once said that the first pleasure of cooking is always having to make a trip to the vegetable market first. In the vegetable market, there are live chickens and ducks, fresh and juicy melons and vegetables, bright red chili peppers, all bustling and crowded together. If the few square meters of your workstation restricts your wild imagination, the few square meters of a crowded kitchen will never let you down. Stuffed and fried fritters again is an invention that Mr. Wang could have applied for a patent. Cut the fritters into small sections about an inch and a half long, use your fingers to hollow out the inner layer, stuff it with minced meat, scallions, and pickled mustard tuber shreds, and then fry them again in the oil pan. He said, "It has an even better flavor than spring rolls. The fried fritters again are extremely crispy. When you chew them, the sound could really reach people ten miles away."

A friend was coming to Beijing, and Mr. Wang wanted to make a dish of braised small radishes. Instead of using the common white radishes, he used the small water radishes that were in season in Beijing and braised them with dried scallops. His friend couldn't stop praising it after eating it.

Stir-fried spinach, crystal sugar elbow, braised pork with fermented bean curd, and yandu xian... The food carefully prepared by Mr. Wang not only made his family and guests enjoy the meal and finish every dish but also filled the old apartment building with laughter.

I ordered a dish of steamed pork with preserved vegetables in a famous restaurant, but it was hard to match the taste of the steamed pork with preserved vegetables that could make me eat two bowls of rice when I was a child. This made me miss the steamed pork with preserved vegetables made by my mother even more. You must use half-fat pork. If the pork is too lean, the steamed pork will stick together like a lifeless "cement stone". Soak the preserved vegetables in water to remove some of the salt before using them, add two water chestnuts, chop them together, add an appropriate amount of bean flour, white granulated sugar, and soy sauce, stir them with salt, and then add a little scallion.

The steamed pork and preserved vegetable patty made in this way has the preserved vegetable stalks still crispy and elastic, able to burst out sweet juice with one bite. The preserved vegetable leaves are like thin boats, holding the saltiness and freshness of the lean meat, the sweetness and crispness of the water chestnuts, and the juice of the fat meat. Mix it with rice and then gobble it up. My mother seldom emphasized as rigidly as the chefs in restaurants which kind of native pig the patty was made from or how many days the preserved vegetable hearts had been dried in the sun, nor would she add some additives to achieve some extraordinary flavor. But in the simple meals, she always had the power to turn the ordinary into something extraordinary.

A friend said that when eating out, he always felt that the taste wasn't right. Recalling the meals made by his mother, he said it was because of the oil his mother used. Cantonese mothers have a deep-rooted preference for peanut oil. After steaming fish, they would pour a spoonful of boiling hot peanut oil over it; when steaming spareribs, they would first coat them with peanut oil; when eating rice noodle rolls, they would also pour soy sauce and peanut oil over the surface.

When frying Chinese kale, cabbage, or shredded potatoes, my mother would scoop out a spoonful of snow-white and soft lard from the enamel pot with a yellow bottom and blue edges decorated with small red flowers, just like scooping out ice cream. When frying a fried rice with vegetables, the melted lard would give off a strong fragrance of fat, like molten lava, carrying the fragrance of the vegetable leaves and the saltiness and freshness of the salted meat, moistening every grain of rice.

When we were children, we had no fascination for home-cooked dishes at all because people don't cherish things that are within easy reach every day. Later, when we left home and went far away, we found that our taste buds had always remembered them for us. When we are full of delicate meals with low salt and sugar outside but can't get comforted, we might as well go home and follow our mother's recipes to cook a home-cooked meal that is rich and goes well with rice by ourselves.

We often say that "All the food affairs around the world are not as good as a bowl of the flavor of daily life." It's not a longing for a poetic countryside. Instead, when the fire on the stove is lit with a "pop", the slices of meat are put into the pan and make a "sizzle" when they touch the hot oil, and white smoke rises up, then the flavor of daily life emerges.

At the end of each episode of "Breakfast in China", we will always see the lively public life, the fresh and juicy melons and fruits in the vegetable market, the vendors making breakfast, and the old people doing morning exercises and walking their grandchildren in the park... These living people are actually in the cities where we live, steaming with vitality in the places we pass by on the bus every day. However, we always lower our heads to look for them in the variety shows on the screen instead of looking up to glance at this life that is close at hand.

I think the flavor of daily life means living in the here and now.