The first dish served was a basin of red-braised rabbit.
Li Long found it quite a novelty, but Xie Yundong, Tao Daqiang, and the others were full of complaints. "Rabbit every day. We're sick of it."
Li Long was curious, and Tao Daqiang explained with a smile:
"Well, the heavy snow drove all the rabbits out of the wasteland and Red Willow Flats. Everyone in the Team who could run went chasing rabbits. Those who caught a lot got forty or fifty, and even those who caught fewer got a dozen or more.
"Every family has been eating rabbit lately. Some people have even put Wild Hares in their pens to raise, saying they'll keep them until New Year.
"Rabbit doesn't taste all that great, either. Once or twice is fine, but after a few more meals, it's nothing special."
Li Long thought it wasn't really that rabbit tasted bad. Mainly, out here in the countryside, people only knew a few ways to cook it at this time. Eating it prepared the same way over and over for several days would certainly get tiresome.
After all, information spread very slowly back then. Cooking methods from other regions hadn't spread here, and ordinary people only knew how to red-braise it or make soup. There were only so many home-style recipes.
In later years, an online search could turn up seven or eight recipes in minutes, things like spicy rabbit heads or cold spicy rabbit. None of those were available now.
It wasn't just rabbit, either. There were crabs, too. Sometime in the 2000s, someone first raised crabs in Big Haizi. Once they grew, the crabs bit through their cages, and soon they were everywhere in Big Haizi. People could spot several kilograms by flashlight in a single night.
At first, everyone