As soon as Lawyer Wang's assistant arrived at Clear Breeze Temple, the sight of Daoist Chang Kong selling ginkgo cakes at the entrance greeted the assistant.
Daoist Chang Kong called, "Come one, come all, don't miss out! Fragrant, sweet, soft, and chewy ginkgo cakes-the cake of your dreams!"
The assistant: "..."
With mixed feelings, the assistant wandered around Clear Breeze Temple and ultimately brought Lawyer Wang back a bag of ginkgo cakes.
Looking at the cakes his young assistant had brought back, Lawyer Wang was rather speechless too. "...I thought Yun Zhaozhao was just opening a canteen at the temple on a whim. I never expected her to actually run it seriously."
The young assistant was quite understanding. "She has to make a living! But give these a try, boss. These ginkgo cakes might look unremarkable, but I tried one on the way back, and they honestly taste really good."
Hearing this, Lawyer Wang tried a piece with a let's-give-it-a-go attitude. Well, what do you know? It really did taste quite good. Unlike ordinary cakes, it wasn't cloyingly sweet. It had a mild sweetness, along with the delicate fragrance of ginkgo nuts. Before he knew it, Lawyer Wang had eaten the whole piece in his hand.
The young assistant had bought plenty. Lawyer Wang kept two pieces for himself and told the assistant to share the rest with their colleagues.
Aside from a very small number of female colleagues who cared about their looks and were watching their figures, almost everyone at the law firm ended up with a piece.
After eating them, everyone agreed that the ginkgo cakes tasted quite good. Those who particularly liked them also made sure to ask the young assistant where they had been bought.
When the young assistant answered that they came from Clear Breeze Temple, this predictably prompted another round of "Where's Clear Breeze Temple?"
When Lawyer Wang got off work that day, he made a point of taking home the two ginkgo cakes he had set aside. There was no other reason-his wife simply liked desserts, and since he thought these ginkgo cakes were good, he wanted to bring some home for her to try too.
Sure enough, his wife was still awake when he got home.
When Lawyer Wang took out the ginkgo cakes he had brought along, Mrs. Wang was rather puzzled. "Haven't you always disliked sweet, sugary things like these? Why did you go out of your way to buy some today?"
Lawyer Wang said, "My assistant bought these from Clear Breeze Temple. I tried a piece and thought it tasted really good, so I brought some home especially for you to try."
Like most people, Mrs. Wang had never heard the name Clear Breeze Temple. Still, if even someone like Lawyer Wang, who disliked desserts, thought these cakes were delicious, they must be quite good.
Mrs. Wang liked to have something sweet in her spare time anyway. Now, hearing her husband recommend them so enthusiastically, she stopped worrying about her figure, gently picked up a ginkgo cake, and took a bite.
The texture really was quite good, soft and chewy like jelly, with a little sweetness, but mostly a delicate fragrance. They were already cold, yet they still tasted this good. Who knew how delicious they would be hot and fresh from the oven!
As she ate, Mrs. Wang couldn't help asking again to confirm, "Where did you say you bought these cakes? Clear Breeze Temple, right?"
Lawyer Wang nodded. "Mm!"
Mrs. Wang said, "I don't think I've heard of that place. Is it far from us? If it's not too far, I'll drive over tomorrow and buy another portion."
Lawyer Wang thought for a moment, then said, "It's pretty out of the way. Even driving would probably take an hour or so."
Mrs. Wang sounded quite regretful. "That really is a bit too far. At that distance, delivery would probably be a stretch too."
Lawyer Wang couldn't help laughing. "Even if it were close, they wouldn't deliver to you. After all, it isn't really a proper shop in the first place. Clear Breeze Temple, Clear Breeze Temple-the name alone tells you it's a Daoist temple..."
The couple chatted about Clear Breeze Temple for a while, then each washed up and went to bed.
At the same time, Yun Zhaozhao was still awake at Clear Breeze Temple. She was sitting cross-legged with Daoist Chang Kong, counting the money they had earned from selling ginkgo cakes over the past few days!
Clear Breeze Temple didn't get many visitors to begin with, and not everyone who came bought their ginkgo cakes, so their daily income was only a few dozen yuan at most. But Yun Zhaozhao was content. After that recent stretch of spending money without bringing any in, she felt that as long as they had income every day, it was a good thing, no matter how much it was. So even though their total income from selling ginkgo cakes was only a hundred yuan or so, she still happily counted it several times.
The only problem now was that their ginkgo nuts were limited, and so were their ginkgo cakes. No matter how few they sold each day, there would come a day when they sold out. What should they sell after that?
A question this specialized naturally called for an expert.
So she turned to Daoist Chang Kong beside her and asked, "Daoist, once we sell out of ginkgo cakes, what should we sell next?"
Daoist Chang Kong looked toward the green bamboo in the courtyard, then past those layers of bamboo toward the green bamboo grove on Clear Breeze Mountain. "What's so difficult about that? By the time we finish the ginkgo nuts, winter should be here. Once winter comes, there'll be winter bamboo shoots, and when spring arrives, there'll be spring bamboo shoots. We can cook the shoots with meat, or dry them and sell dried bamboo shoots. Besides, there are cherry blossoms in the park in spring, so we can make cherry blossom cakes then. There are peach blossoms too, which we can make into peach blossom honey..."
Yun Zhaozhao listened, spellbound, looking at Daoist Chang Kong as though he were an all-powerful god.
Daoist Chang Kong gently patted his belly and remarked, "Nature is very generous. Look at all this flesh on me-it's all a gift from nature."
Yun Zhaozhao: "..." This was the first time she had ever seen anyone describe being fat in such a refreshingly refined way.
Chapter 6
Ever since Xu Ping had brought her coworkers to eat at Yun Zhaozhao's Clear Breeze Temple, Yun Zhaozhao had been planning to treat Xu Ping to a meal in private, as thanks for supporting the temple's business that day.
But she called Xu Ping twice, and both times Xu Ping politely declined on the grounds that she was too busy with work.
Later, Yun Zhaozhao gave up on treating Xu Ping to a meal. However, she did make a point of mailing her several boxes of ginkgo cakes, using the packaging boxes and bags she had recently had custom-made online.
The design of these packaging boxes and bags was quite to Yun Zhaozhao's liking, but Daoist Chang Kong didn't look particularly satisfied. Of course, his dissatisfaction wasn't over anything else-he simply thought Yun Zhaozhao had drawn him a little too fat.
Feeling guilty, Yun Zhaozhao explained herself. "I just used a tiny little bit of exaggeration as a rhetorical device... Besides, being chubby looks so cute!"
Daoist Chang Kong wore a haughty expression. "...Hmph!"
On the day the new packaging boxes arrived, Yun Zhaozhao also received a call from the tailor's shop at the market. The new Daoist robes she had ordered last time were ready, and they asked her to find time to pick them up.
It wasn't easy for Yun Zhaozhao to make a trip into town these days, so on this trip, she brought back not only Daoist Chang Kong's new robes but also the fish fry she had been longing for and several jin of pork.
At the sight of the fish and his new clothes, Daoist Chang Kong forgot that he had been quietly sulking over the packaging boxes and cheerfully scurried off to the pool with fish food to feed the fish.
With nothing to do, Yun Zhaozhao lay in the shade of a tree and read the book she had bought at the bookstore, Fortune-Telling Crash Course in 30 Days.
Daoist Chang Kong thoroughly disapproved of Yun Zhaozhao's approach of chasing quick results. After all, any fortune-telling method you could learn in thirty days was probably written into the criminal code. In Daoist Chang Kong's mind, the only thing in the world you could probably accomplish in thirty days was getting fat.
Still, he didn't dampen Yun Zhaozhao's enthusiasm for bettering herself. After finishing feeding the fish on his own, he began curing meat for smoking.
-There was no refrigerator at the temple, so fresh pork was difficult to store after buying it. Since the weather had also been clear these past few days, Daoist Chang Kong planned to cure extra meat for smoking, both to make it easier to store and to have it ready for making soup with winter bamboo shoots once winter arrived.
A proper
gourmet
had to learn to mend the roof before the rain came!
Ever since eating the ginkgo cakes Lawyer Wang brought home that night, Mrs. Wang had been longing for a chance to taste them again. As it happened, their child had no extracurricular classes that weekend, and there wasn't much school homework either, so she invited a few mothers of her child's classmates and drove all the way to Qingfeng Park, undeterred by the distance, hoping to buy more ginkgo cakes to satisfy her craving.
To be honest, although Mrs. Wang had been born and raised in this city, her memories of Qingfeng Park were rather vague. As for Clear Breeze Temple, she had never even heard of it.
Only when she came this time did she discover that Qingfeng Park was actually quite large. It had all the flowers and trees, and even lawns, that an ordinary park would have. Most importantly, there were truly very few people here, unlike the sports park near her home, which was packed to bursting every weekend.
As long as a park had few people, the experience of visiting it instantly improved. In any case, all the mothers who had come along were very pleased with Qingfeng Park, which Mrs. Wang had found. Aside from being a little far away and a little out of the way, they couldn't find anything wrong with it so far.
As for Clear Breeze Temple, which Mrs. Wang had been longing to find, it stood at the foot of the mountain beyond the park's vast lawn.
The children began romping across the lawn as soon as they entered the park. With nothing but her ginkgo cakes on her mind, Mrs. Wang asked the friends accompanying her to help watch her child, then went ahead to Clear Breeze Temple to buy them.
Earlier, when looking around Qingfeng Park, Mrs. Wang had already thought there were few people. Now that she was inside Clear Breeze Temple, she felt there were pitifully few.
Mrs. Wang even had the illusion that she was the only person in the entire temple, as though she had accidentally wandered into a secret realm devoid of human habitation.
Just as Mrs. Wang began to wonder whether she had come to the wrong place, she suddenly caught the aroma of roasting meat.
Calling it the aroma of roasting meat wasn't quite accurate, actually. It was more like the charred fragrance of pork skin being singed over a flame.
Mrs. Wang couldn't help following the aroma. Passing through one courtyard gate after another, she finally saw a young woman beneath an enormous ginkgo tree in a courtyard, holding a book and reading with rapt attention. Beside her, a fat Daoist in Daoist robes was roasting several pieces of pork over charcoal on a rack. The aroma of roasting meat Mrs. Wang had smelled earlier had probably come from here.