In China, April 4, 2017 is the day of Qingming Festival. The date of Qingming, dpending on the 15th day from the Spring Equinox, changes every year between April 4th to 6th. On that day people will go to sweep tombs to commemorate ancestors as the most important activity to show respect to our ancestors. Also, people will have 3-day holiday to go out for spring outing to celebrate the coming of spring, green and blossom. During Qingming, willow starts turning green, for a good meaning, people will put willow branches on gates for protection against evil, as well as for welcoming the spring and green. When people going out for spring outing, they will make a willow crown and put on head. To celebrate Qingming, different places in China has their own special food to celebrate. I am going to introduce several common food in China. One calls Qing Tuan, meaning green glutinous rice ball. Mixed glutinous rice and juice from green mugwort or barley grass makes it green, symbolizes the green of spring, and normally with red bean paste as fillings. There are many other food that people eat around Qingming time. For example, snails are getting fattest around Qingming, thus it is the best time to eat snails, which been called Qingming snails. Snails can be stir-fried with shell, and flavored with garlic, ginger, soy sauce, cooking wine, and chili, then eat with toothpick to pick out the meat. Also the flesh can be picked out first and cooked with other ingredients, for example, in my hometown, snail meat stir-fried with Chinese chives is the most common combination. Sanzi is made of wheat flour dough as noddles and deep fried, making it very crispy. Nowadays, it is not only eaten during Qingming, gradually it is eaten as snack in many places in China. Around Qingming, in many warm places the peach starts blossoming. In my hometown, the peach blossoms every year, and my family will go to botanic garden to visit the beautiful peach blossom. As a good ingredient to cooking, people will use peach blossom for congee. This custom can be traced back to Tang Dynasty. Thank you for reading about the new culture about Chinese Qingming Festival. Even though I am at Miami now where always is green, I still want you enjoy the coming of spring and try more Chinese food!
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Similar to Salad, Chinese also have seasoned vegetable and meat as cold appetizers served as first dishes. Generally, the cold dishes are divided in to two categories: vegetarian and meat or seafood. Cold dishes are common during summer for appetizing and cooling. A few dishes are easy to cook at home, and many dishes are commonly be ordered or bought for banquet. Depend on different type of vegetables, it can be served as seasoned raw vegetable appetizer or seasoned scalded vegetable appetizer. The cucumber and tomato are the two most common and easiest vegetable cold dishes. The tomatoes are served as slices and sprinkled with sugar. The cucumber can be cut into slices, strips or chunks and then seasoned with salt, sugar, minced garlic, soy sauce, vinegar, sesame oil, and if you like, chili can be added. These are the two typical vegetables that need to be scalded first and then seasoned with salt, soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, sesame oil, and chili. The century egg (mentioned at the breakfast post: century egg and pork congee) and soft tofu can be served separately or as one dish, seasoned with soy sauce, black rice vinegar, and sesame oil. Eating the starch jelly with savory sauce makes you cool and feel comfortable in hot summer. There is another kind of thinner cold noodle seasoned with sliced cucumber, gluten, and bean sprouts, could be a dish on table but more commonly as a street food. The marinated chicken and duck wings and feet are already seasoned during pot stewing and served as cold dish. The mixed animal offals also are pre-marinated, commonly including pig ears, beef shank, and gizzard. The Fuqi Fei Pian also is a famous cold dish. Saliva? You must be curious about the weird name. There are two explanations, one is that the deliciousness makes your mouth water, and another one is that the chili makes your mouth water. Thus, it is a metaphor of its deliciousness. The saliva chicken is short poaching cooked first and cool down in cold water, finally soaked in chili oil. Similarly there is one dish called Slat Brined Duck, cooked duck and served as cold dish, while no additional sauce to eat with since it already been flavored during cooking.
The Jellyfish, while I know many of you haven't heard about it and you may think is that edible? Yes, some jellyfish is edible and can be found at Chinese mart. Even though jellyfish is tasteless, it can be soaked in savory sauce and with its crunchy texture, it is a good choice of cold dish in hot days. If you have chance must try it. Thank you for your reading! See you next time! There are many differences between Chinese and American food culture, while it is hard to list all the differences. Let's start from the first meal of the day - Breakfast! Chinese start their busy day early in the morning around 6am for job or school. Thus it is a big problem for them to have time to cook breakfast at home. The way Chinese eat breakfast is distinctive than American. It is easy because Chinese can buy various types of breakfast at street shops, while it is not easy because most of the breakfast dishes are not easy to make. Rice congee is the mainstay diet of Chinese breakfast. It is common and simple to make at home. With enough water that more than you use for cook rice, cook the rice for a long time until the rice get soft and thicker. It is great having warm and mild meal to start a nice day! Of course, you can add other ingredients to make various flavors. It can be sweet or salty with what ever you want, meat, vegetables, or seafoods. In addition to the variety of congee, we also have Tofu Pudding as one of the important diets for Chinese breakfast that you may never heard before. It is a kind tofu that is very soft and tastes like pudding that made from raw beans. While, depend on deferent regions in China, people like different flavor of tofu pudding. Generally, people from the North prefer salty tofu pudding, while people from South prefer sweet tofu pudding, besides, the tofu pudding also can be spicy, especially people from Sichuan love Spicy. Usually, we don't eat congee or tofu pudding alone, we have various side dishes to eat with. One of the traditional and typical snack is deep-fired dough slice. Just like its name, it is deep-fired sticks of dough. And it is great to eat with some soupy dishes, such as congee, tofu pudding, and soymilk. Another type of side dish that I love is steamed buns. It also has different flavors for you to change your choice everyday. Steamed buns are made from wheat flour. After fermentation, the buns have a spongy feel. The basic steamed bun (without any fillings) is called Mantou. It can be white made from wheat flour, brown made with wholemeal flour, or yellow made from corn flour. In addition to steamed buns, another famous Chinese cooking way is pan-frying. For example, the pan-fried buns called "Shengjian" and pan-fried dumplings called "Guotie" have crisp browned bottom, also have more juicy fillings. Shaomai is one of my favorite buns. It has thinner wrapper and different fillings than the buns that I have mentioned above. The most common fillings of shaomai are sticky rice, shiitake mushroom, and minced pork. Sticky rice as the basic ingredient of shaomai, you can replace the pork with other meat or seafoods, or you can make vegetarian shaomai. These are not all the dishes we eat for breakfast, there are many other delicious dishes such as various flavors of noodles, wonton (another type of dumpling), spring roll, egg pancake, and so on. Now, you know how different the Chinese breakfast and American Breakfast. Would you try Chinese breakfast? These video will teach you how to make these at home. Go to my Youtube page find the Chinese Breakfast playlist! Or you can just find a Chinese Restaurant to order these delicious dishes!
Thank you for your reading. See you next week! Happy Lunar New Year! January 28, 2017 is the first day of Lunar Calendar of the rooster year. In China, people start celebrating the most important festival-Spring Festival. Even I cannot celebrate it with my family, but I cannot miss one of the important cuisines during Chinese new year. That is dumpling! In Chinese we call it Jiao Zi "饺子“, which is a homonym for ”交子” meaning the moment of the transferring to new year. Thus, people always eat dumplings to celebrate the coming of new year. In addition, there is another explanation of eating dumplings: the shape of dumpling looks like gold ingots, thus it also symbolizes wealth. Nowadays, dumpling becomes a cuisine not only for festival, but a common daily dishes. Now, let's learn how make delicious dumplings! Depending on your taste, different fillings can be used to make dumplings. Today I am going to introduce you the dumpling with pork and cabbage I made with friends for the celebration of Chinese New Year. Ingredient: 1.5lb minced pork 6 leaves of cabbage,chopped dumpling wrappers minced ginger minced scallion, light soy sauce salt oil First Step: Make fillings: well mix pork, cabbage, ginger, and scallion all together (according to your taste, add appropriate ginger and scallion) Add 3 spoon of soy sauce Add half spoon salt Add half spoon oil Well mix the fillings again Second Step: Dampen the edges of the wrapper with water, scoop appropriate of filling on it. Then, click the following file to download a short video to learn how to wrap! Third Step: Put your beautiful dumplings on a large plate or container, remember to put powder as a base on the plate so that the dumplings will not stick on the plate, also do not put dumplings close to each other, avoiding them sticking on each other. Fourth Step: Put dumplings into boiled water and stir slowly with the back of a ladle. Once the dumplings float on the water, continue to boil about 1 minute using low heat. Then scoop out dumplings. Last Step! Enjoy it! Usually I like to eat it with vinegar, you also can make sauce depend on your taste. Thank you for your reading!
Visit my YouTube, click the playlist of "How to make dumplings", you will find the full video from CiCi Li to follow making dumplings. (The second video from Maggie Zhu will teach you how to make dumpling wrappers). |
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