"You know, even old Tawalla's cooking skills when he was young might not be as good as yours. He was better at making chili sauce. Many of the sauces on the shrimp rice carts here come from his secret recipe."
Danny grabbed a large chicken leg and chewed it with his mouth full of oil and a satisfied look on his face. Cheng Hao was obviously a better eater than him. After stripping off a whole chicken wing, he filled a large bowl of chicken soup for himself, and then set his eyes on the stir-fried chicken offal next to it, which looked even more delicious.
Jack was also very satisfied with today's pot of chicken soup. These old Cantonese people didn't know how to raise chickens. Ordinary domestic chickens were usually eaten when they grew to three or four pounds, and the two he picked weighed more than nine pounds in total. This training time would have taken at least two and a half years.
Moreover, he had no idea what breed this chicken was. It didn't look like the common white-feathered chicken in North America, and it looked very different from the Rock Chicken (Luhua Chicken).
"It's probably a wild chicken from Kauai. They're so well adapted to the local environment that some chicken farmers mix them with their own chickens to prevent disease."
Cheng Hao, a local, enthusiastically explained this to Jack.
Hundreds of years ago, the Polynesians, the first inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands, crossed the vast ocean and arrived in this paradise.
They brought crops like taro and sweet potatoes, as well as livestock and poultry like dogs, pigs, and chickens.
The chickens raised by the Polynesians were different from the common chickens of today. They were more similar to the red junglefowl, the ancestor of all modern chickens. Small and extremely agile, and lacking natural predators, they quickly flourished across the Hawaiian islands.
Initially, these wild chickens were little-known, living in the tropical jungle far from human habitation. A lack of food effectively limited their populations.
However, two hurricanes in the 1980s and 1990s destroyed many chicken farms and backyards on the islands, causing a large number of chickens to escape into the wild.
After the year 2000, people were surprised to discover a significant increase in the number of feral chickens on Kauai, along with their size.
These birds were everywhere on the island, roaming near residential areas, orchards, and even in parking lots.
Kauai residents adopted these feral chickens as a kind of mascot, featuring them on various merchandise, postcards, T-shirts, and even a popular children's TV show named "Rooster Russell."
"So, these chickens aren't protected?" Jack was relieved. He was just buying two chickens, so he didn't want to rip off the vendor, who had even been so kind as to clean them thoroughly. "
It depends on the location. If they're in a nature reserve, they're considered wild and prohibited from capture. But if they wander into developed areas or private property, they're considered 'free range chickens' and can be killed at will."
Kono grabbed two slices of bread and a can of mayonnaise from the refrigerator, then gazed eagerly at the pot of chicken soup before him, a look of confusion on his face.
"Don't you want to try it?" Jack looked at her doubtfully. It seemed that there was nothing to be restricted about chicken soup. According to the girl's age, she shouldn't have gout.
"It looks too greasy." Kono swallowed hard, and after hesitating for a long time, he chose to open the mayonnaise and prepare to spread it on the bread.
"Greasy?" Jack looked at the chicken soup with a layer of golden oil film, which made people's appetite increase at a glance, and then looked at the mayonnaise in Kono's hand, and his forehead was black.
This girl was holding a super calorie bomb and told him that the chicken soup was too greasy. Did she get something wrong?
He waved to Kono, took the jar of mayonnaise from her hand and placed it in his palm, and asked seriously, "Do you know what this is made of?"
"Egg yolk? Isn't that right?" the girl looked bewildered, even Danny and Cheng Hao, happily enjoying their chicken, cast curious glances.
Jack scanned the small, simple kitchen, noting the ingredients were all present. He sighed and pulled out a large cup. "Let me show you a magic trick."
He cracked two eggs into the cup, deftly removing the whites and leaving only the yolks. As the three stunned people watched, he chug-dunked in a little over a pound of salad oil, added a few tablespoons of sugar, a pinch of salt, vinegar, and juice, and began to stir rapidly.
Their astonishment wasn't so much Jack's astonishing hand speed and endurance, which rivaled those of a hand mixer, but the fact that, in less than ten minutes, a large cup of delicious, vibrant mayonnaise had been created.
"Greasy?" Jack scooped a spoonful of the finished product and handed it to Kono. "Try it."
Kono instinctively licked it, surprised to find that his mayonnaise tasted almost identical to her usual one.
"Salad dressing, Thousand Island dressing, tartar sauce and all the Western sauces you have eaten are basically made in this way. For the same plate of vegetables, the salad method looks very healthy, right?
But if you switch to the Chinese stir-fry method, the actual amount of oil used is less than one-third of this, and basically no sugar is used. Moreover, after eating a plate of stir-fried dishes, some oil will remain on the plate.
You will lick the sauce clean, but you certainly won't drink the greasy vegetable soup, right?"
After Jack finished speaking, he poured a large bowl of chicken soup for Kono, and pushed the fried chicken offal that Cheng Hao had already eaten one-third of in front of her, "I took most of the oil from the two chickens and used it to stir-fry this plate of chicken offal. No extra cooking oil was used."
Danny and Cheng Hao were fine, but Kono was already covering his face, "Oh my God, what can I eat in the future?"
Jack also maliciously shared the ingredients of the cake and biscuits, basically clearing out the daily diet of these three people, which caused a protest.
Just as everyone was enjoying their meal and joking about how unfortunate the shot Jack received, if it had been a little further off, he might have stayed in Hawaii to work as a chef, Danny's phone rang.
Seeing the caller ID, he quickly put his index finger to his lips, signaling everyone to be quiet, and then pressed the answer button, "Good evening, Mr. Governor. Okay, no problem, we'll be leaving right away."
"What happened?" Jack saw his expression freeze for a moment, then turned serious, and he already had an ominous premonition.
Danny looked at Cheng Hao and Kono, and finally turned to Jack with a very stiff neck as if it was rusted, "I heard that you have dealt with the CDC several times?"
When he heard the abbreviation CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), Jack's smile froze on his face, and he made a dry joke that was not very funny, "Is it too late for me to change my ticket to tonight?"
"I think you may have to stay here for a while." Danny patted his shoulder and picked up his car keys.
(End of this chapter)