It’s Winter Solstice Festival!

My day of our last Chinese special festival of the year – Winter Solstice Festival – tong zhi (冬至), starts with making the dough for glutinous rice flour balls, called thang yuen (汤圆). I just love the eat this since I was young (not because of my mom force-fed me!), and so I decided to lend my mom a helping hand to complete today’s task!

I helped to get those ingredients, tools and colourings ready in the kitchen in advance, so that we can have our tasty meal of glutinous rice flour balls as soon as possible.

Getting things ready in the morning.

In the picture above, from left we can see…
(1) A container of Pandan (known as screw pine or pandanus amaryllifolius) juice, which we squeeze them ourselves out of the leaves. It is used as green colouring.
(2) A bottle of red aritifcial colouring, but we only added a few little drips (as it is really concentrated!)
(3) A bottle of water
(4) A cup of concentrated sugar solution (this reminds me of my Biology experiments)
(5) Bowls + Spoons (don’t tell me that we’re eating with our hands!)

Then we started to mix the flour with concentrated sugar solution (self-made!). Not ordinary flour we are using, but the ones specially made for making glutinous rice flour balls and other Chinese food.

 
My mom puring the flour (left) and making them with concentrated sugar solution and water (right).

The kitchen got really messy because the flour keep flying around and suspended in the air. So we went “achoo!” lots of times.

After that we added colouring to each bundle of dough. Of course we mixed the colourings well with the dough! They really looks nice and delicious!

From bottom left corner: White, Purple (not really obvious), Pink and Green.

Getting the doughs in the kitchen for rolling and cooking.

We started rolling those doughs into little balls before palcing them in the cooker. Wow, the soup (cooked with pandan leaves and ginger) really smells nice!

Cooking delicious glutinous rice flour balls!

At first, raw rice flour balls sink but then if they’re cooked they’ll float! So we just take the flaoting rice flour balls while waiting the others to be cooked!

Glutionous rice flour balls are served with hot soup! Wow, delicious! *Saliva gushing out crazily

Happy Winter Solstice everybody!