After walking for nearly 40 minutes, Katie took Lin Yilong across Hyde Park to her apartment.
The apartments of newly employed professional girls are usually very untidy. In addition to the unclean public areas, public equipment is often damaged, and moldy walls are one of the manifestations of untidiness. The newly built apartments are not bad. As for the old apartments distributed in Paddington and Kensington, they are no better than Vera's cheap apartment in the tower area at the beginning - dirty bowls are always piled in the kitchen sink; The spots on the stove, oven and microwave oven that can never be wiped clean; A teacup and spoon forever soaked in sewage. In short, if you want to share with others, there will always be various sanitary inconveniences in the public facilities where you live together.
In fact, this is easy to understand: young people have no money, when they first started work, they were still busy with work, and occasionally they were busy with dating other people when they had a break. This kind of impurity can be understood by other people who live together - so, in order not to passively "understand" such situations, Lin Yilong never asked others to share a lease, but lived in a single apartment with greater independence.
At least when Lin Yilong came last time, the kitchen shared by Katie and her roommate was the same as other shared kitchens he had seen. Lin Yilong could not help worrying about the food hygiene tonight. When Lin Yilong entered Katie's kitchen with two large bottles of cola, a watermelon and several bags of cashews when Katie returned to her room to change clothes, he even heard his entire digestive system crying.
This time, the kitchen was quite clean, from the ceiling to the floor, from the windowsill to the door, and was carefully cleaned.
You may hear Katie and Lin Yilong coming in, and Katie's roommate comes out of the room.
Lin Yilong did not expect to be able to describe Katie's roommate's words exactly. Her skin color is not as dark as that of South Asian men and many other South Asian women. It is a little like the feeling of European white people covered with thin black gauze, plus the dark circles of her eyes caused by staying up late for a long time. If such a state appears on the street, I'm afraid that the patrol will investigate whether to take possession nerve stimulants.
When meeting strangers, Lin Yilong always puts on a business smile.
"Hello, first meeting!" Katie's roommate greeted Lin Yilong. "You must be Katie's boyfriend. Katie seldom brings others here."
"When I first met you, I was Lin Yilong. Just call me Yi." Lin Yilong introduced himself. "What should I call you?"
"Fatima." Fatima is the name of Muhammad's aunt and daughter, which is the most common name for her in the Muslim world. "What do you do? Like Katie, you are also a lawyer?"
"Once was." Lin Yilong replied briefly.
The two continued to greet each other politely for a while, until Katie came out of the room after changing her clothes.
"Tonight, I'm going to make traditional mutton steamed rice in Bangladesh," Fatima said.
"Please repeat?" said Lin Yilong, another word that he couldn't understand.
"Mutton Steamed Rice is a special dish in Bangladesh that combines mutton, long grain rice and spices," Fatima said.
After confirming that "mutton steamed rice" was not an English word, Lin Yilong knew he had asked a stupid question.
"What are we missing?" Katie asked.
"If possible, I'm just a very important spice," Fatima said. "I'm short of saffron. This kind of thing can only be stocked in large supermarkets."
Katie looked at Lin Yilong, who immediately understood.
"What else is missing?" Lin Yilong asked. "I just went to buy one together."
"If you can buy butter, it's much better than rapeseed oil," Fatima said.
When Lin Yilong went out, he borrowed a Barclays bicycle and went to Tesco Supermarket, the nearest supermarket in Holland Park.
I walked around the supermarket for a long time and found butter, but I couldn't find saffron.
"Excuse me, do you know where saffron is?" Lin Yilong also heard about saffron for the first time. Thinking it was a kind of spice unique to Bangladeshis, he asked the salesperson in the supermarket.
The salesperson points to the condiment counter for Lin Yilong and hands him an empty standard condiment bottle with Saffron written on it.
"It's empty!" Lin Yilong shouted in surprise.
The salesperson shook the bottle up and down, revealing several very thin red stamens in a very small plastic bag.
"Only half a gram." The salesperson pointed to the net content on the package and introduced it to Lin Yilong. "Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world, of course."
Lin Yilong got the goods he needed, paid the money, returned to the Dutch Park and gave them to Fatima. Under Fatima's repeated humility, Lin Yilong retreated from the kitchen to Katie's room and gave the kitchen to the chef Fatima and the servant Katie.
When he arrived at Katie's room, he went to inquire about the price and cultivation method of saffron, which was very suitable for Lin Yilong's forest farm, especially the courtyard and garden transformed from the abandoned town after being leveled.
In the wild, saffron cannot be found. It is a product of human nurture - it is not difficult to cultivate and process saffron. However, the most valuable reason for the price of this plant in spices is that although it is not difficult to plant, people only need the stamens of this flower for flavoring and dyeing, and other parts will be abandoned. Usually 75000 saffron flowers can collect a pound of saffron spice raw materials, and then dry them to produce less than a pound of finished saffron spice. The main reasons for supporting the high price of saffron are the accumulation of flower fertilizer, pest control, and labor costs during collection, as well as the sanctions being imposed on Iran, the main producing area.
Even Britain, in Cornwall and Devon, which are rich in dark cuisine, also has sideline saffron production, which can reach dozens of kilograms a year, completely unable to meet the needs of South Asians and Middle Easters entering the British Islands. The market entry threshold of saffron is lower than that of truffle. Unlike the special needs of truffle restaurants or luxury stores, Lin Yilong even takes home grown saffron to Arab or South Asian style shops and restaurants, as well as hookah cafes, where he can get purple and red tickets [Note].
That is, as long as the EU sanctions against Iran are not lifted, the price of saffron will be guaranteed for a long time.
The conclusions from Lin Yilong's preliminary investigation are very encouraging. The next step is to take Fatima's opportunity to cook mutton steamed rice. It's lucky to have a direct taste of the magical taste of saffron. If you like the taste of saffron, maybe it's not a bad thing for Londoners to let a group of Middle Easterners gather near Paddington Station and in the tower area to open shops, restaurants and hookahs.
Hearing that Katie invited him to the kitchen for dinner, Lin Yilong went out without saying a word. In the plate in front of him, like the steamed rice in Jiangnan, mutton and South Asia long grain rice were mixed together, and the distinction was not very obvious.