Dinner was Zhou Shuling's "invention": paper-wrapped fish.
She had used a large local carp Zhou Shuling had bought at the market on the first day of Qingming Festival. This kind of carp had firm flesh and a slight muddy taste, but it was very easy to keep alive. After buying one, people would generally keep it in a large water vat for a few days and let it spit out all the mud and sand. By then, that muddy taste was nearly gone, and it tasted good steamed, boiled, pan-fried, or grilled.
For some reason, hardly anyone in the south ate carp nowadays. It clearly wasn't a fish with inedible flesh, yet carp farming for consumption in the south was even less prosperous than koi farming.
Paper-wrapped fish was generally not made with carp. More commonly, people used catfish, Lingbo fish, sea bass, basa fish, snakehead, grass carp, and so on. Zhou Shuling had come up with the novel idea of using a large carp—that was the part she had "invented."
With the whole family plus Li Hongfang, no carp would have been enough, no matter how big it was. So Zhou Shuling had also prepared large prawns, beef, abalone, sea cucumber, rehydrated dried mushrooms, and other side ingredients.
What Zhou Shuling had just told Zhou Dongdong to pick was cilantro. This child clearly couldn't eat vegetable leaves or roots with strong, pungent flavors like fish mint, yet she could eat cilantro raw. When she picked vegetables, she ate all the cilantro leaves and left the stalks on the plate, so naturally Zhou Shuling had chased her out of the kitchen.
In fact, it was very common for people to be able to eat cilantro but not fish mint, or to eat fish mint but find cilantro impossible to swallow.