Chinese New Year festivities last for 15 days. At home it was usually a one day affair on the first day of the Lunar New Year, but here, a little homesick for eating Chinese food with my parents and grandparents, I take every chance I can get to eat more of the food my grandma used to make. For this dinner, our friend's mother from Beijing prepared the food, and we provided dessert. Dessert first: I love desserts with red bean, sometimes even ordering it on the side, like one might ask for a side of chocolate sauce or ice cream. Ba bao fan, or eight treasure rice, stuffed with red bean paste, is one my favorites, maybe because it's usually reserved for special occasions. Above is the ba bao fan, miraculously unmolded from the bowl. Below is the first step of assembling the ba bao fan: lining the bowl with the eight treasures. Though in this case, I only had four dried fruits (only realizing now that that's probably a huge taboo because four is an unlucky number): raisins, Chinese red dates, kumquats, and lotus seeds.
A layer of sticky rice goes on top of this, then a layer of red bean paste, topped with more sticky rice to reach the top of the bowl. The whole bowl is steamed for about thirty minutes, and then flipped upside down on a plate to reveal the domed rice. Never having done this before, I had my doubts...but when the rice unmolded, dried fruits still in their concentric rings, my friend and I literally screamed with delight. I melted some rock candy (after burning the first pot of sugar) and poured it over the rice before serving.
But before dessert, we were tasked with filling and pleating a hundred or so dumplings (we had to earn our dinner), with our friend's mother guiding (laughing at?) us. I used to do this with my grandma, but didn't realize there were regional differences in rolling the wrappers. We used to roll circles like one rolls out cookie dough, with even pressure all around, resulting in slightly thick wrappers and doughy pleats. My friend's mother rolls out the wrappers using the edge of rolling pin on the edge of the dough circles, while rotating the dough, which produces a wrapper that's slightly thicker in the middle. Once the circle is folded in half over the filling and pleated, the different thicknesses are unnoticeable, and the resulting dumpling is more delicate.
1 comments:
Babaofan is a great festive food, though for the modern taste perhaps a little too sweet.
I have written an article on the innovation of traditional Chinese foods with babaofan as an example. You can find it at: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/1081362/Rethinking-the-Tradition
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