Dinner consisted of only two dishes...
A giant pot of snake soup, and sizzling "Hook Snake" steaks cooked fresh on the griddle...
After spending several hours on it, Alvin admitted that his snake soup hadn't turned out quite right...
He blanched the snake meat, shredded it, then mixed it with shredded chicken, lean pork, shiitake mushrooms, and dried tangerine peel. He added soy sauce and peanut oil and stirred everything together.
He strained and brought the broth from blanching the snake meat to a boil, then tossed in all the ingredients and let them stew together. Finally, he added salt, pepper, and soy sauce, thickened the soup, and served it!
Every step had gone according to plan, and it tasted pretty good, too.
Unfortunately, although the soup was fragrant and nourishing, Frank had chopped the snake meat into mince in a fit of embarrassed anger instead of shredding it as Alvin had wanted. As a result, the finished dish looked more like Hot and Sour Soup...
That was more or less how Alvin remembered snake soup looking, but the fact that you couldn't find a single piece of snake meat in it really took away from the dish...
Still, Alvin was the sort who could talk his way out of anything, and these foreigners were easy to fool...
A made-up story could give snake soup a legendary aura, and with all the supposed benefits of "nourishing yin and yang," "clearing heat and detoxifying," and "strengthening the spleen and kidneys"...
In the end, even Pepper, a fussy young woman, risked putting on weight and drank two bowls.
This mild soup was actually a perfect fit for the ladies' tastes. The fresh, savory soup was nowhere near as gloopy as it looked.
Watching the women slurp it down with gusto, Alvin grinned