Author: Zoe Wong

Soup for Glutinous Rice Balls / TongYuan / 湯圓

| Zoe Wong

Chinese New Year 2019

My black sesame TongYuan.  Forgive me for taking pictures in low lighting!

Once upon a time, when your chef was about ten years old, she embarked on a journey to make homemade glutinous rice balls after being inspired by a certain 姨姨 / yí yí  (informal: auntie that’s not necessarily related, but close; more commonly- and correctly- pronounced 阿姨 / āyí). 

With her mother’s money, she bought cheap glutinous flour and chunky peanut butter.  

She battled through the sticky dough that clung to her clothes and fingernails.  Unable to prevent the kitchen from the floury mess, she was banished from the kitchen…

I’m just kidding, but the result wasn’t great, to say the least. 

The skin of the rice ball was too thick and uneven, and she found that peanut butter just didn’t cut it as a cheat-filling.  

Young me learned a lesson that day- just buy your glutinous rice balls.  A pack of 10 balls is cheaper than buying peanut butter alone; plus, you avoid the mess and the struggle.

Peanut rice ball (store-bought)

However, in China, making rice balls is a common family activity on New Year’s, which I agree, can be fun with multiple people (people who struggle together, stay together).

In the last post, I mentioned that most of the Chinese New Year dishes are puns for New Year’s blessings.  In this case, the Chinese word for these glutinous rice balls is TongYuan- “Yuan” literally means a circle or ball-shaped.  Therefore (according to some article I read somewhere) this dessert symbolizes family togetherness.

That said, the only thing that needs a recipe would be the syrupy soup that is served with the rice balls.  

My mother, like many Chinese folks, make their soup with slabs of brown sugar, inaccurately translated on the following example as “brown candy”:

Questionable name choice??

I didn’t have any brown candy lying around, so I substituted it with plain old, brown sugar.

Rice balls are done when they float to the surface.

Soup for Glutinous Rice Balls

  • Servings: 20 rice balls / 2 packs
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Generally, you should cook your glutinous rice balls as per the directions written on the back of the packaging, but here’s what I did:

Ingredients

  • 3 Cups of water
  • 1/2 Cup of brown sugar (or to taste)
  • 2, 1/4-inch slices of ginger (or to taste)

Directions

  1. Heat 3 cups of water in a medium-sized pot.  When water is hot (doesn’t have to boil), add the rice balls. 
  2. Add the brown sugar and ginger slices and let the pot boil.  
  3. Stir occasionally to melt the sugar.  
  4. Cook rice balls until they float to the surface.
  5. Divide the balls among the serving bowls and pour an equal amount of soup in each bowl.

I’ve also made the soup separately in advance.  When the time for dessert came, I simply reheated the soup and cooked the rice balls directly in it.

As a kid, glutinous rice balls were my favorite Chinese dessert, specifically the black sesame-filled one because I loved all things black sesame (Sweet Black Sesame Soup / 芝麻糊 was my calling ❤).

Now that I’m older, I prefer the peanut-filled ones, but glutinous riceballs come in all types of weird flavors nowadays like matcha, durian, and cheese.

Buddha’s Delight / Lo Han Jai / 羅漢齋

| Zoe Wong

Chinese New Year 2019

Re-hydrating ingredients.

Even when I used to live at home, my mother would only make one dish that’s associated with new year’s, Ho See Fat Choy.  It is a braised dried oyster and black moss fungus dish.  It doesn’t sound too appealing, I know, but I swear, if you get past the fact that black moss looks like hair, it’s actually really darn tasty (especially the mushrooms that soak up all that sauce).  


Ho See Fat Choy from “Food for Life TV”

A lot of the Chinese New Year dishes are puns.  Fat Choy refers to the black moss, but it also sounds a lot like prosperity or “to get rich” (fā cái).  The equivalent Chinese New Year saying is:

  恭喜发财 (gōng xǐ fā cái) 

“Wish you wealth and prosperity.”

Anyways, since my parents never really made a traditional Chinese New Year dinner spread (we’d be overwhelmed anyways with only three mouths), I couldn’t turn to them for help.

Equipped only with my knowledge of how dishes are supposed to taste like (courtesy of obligatory awkward Chinese New Year family gatherings at overpriced restaurants) and Google-sensei, I bravely approached the first dish: Buddha’s Delight.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know that it was called “Buddha’s Delight”.  In Chinese, we refer to this dish as zhāi or lo han jai (羅漢齋).  The English name makes sense though.  Buddhist monks are famously vegetarian, and this dish hails from Buddhist cuisine.  It’s served on New Year’s because according to Buddhist tradition, no animal or fish should be killed on the first day of the lunar year.

Simering.
Use a plate slightly smaller than the bowl to push down the bean curds into the water!

Neither my apartmates nor I are Buddhist, or vegetarian (though I often cook like one), but somehow, this dish got brought up in conversation with one apartmate and unquestioningly, I took up the task of researching how to make it.  Also, as per Chinese New Year tradition, I wanted to include a noodle dish for dinner. 

While longevity noodles, a flat egg noodle, are typically used to express the blessing of long life, I thought, eh, the mung bean noodles in this dish are still noodles…and they can be long.  And therefore, yes. 

Be sure to consult the mung bean packaging for cooking directions.   Mine happened to tell me that I should submerge mine in hot water for about 15 minutes or until soft.

I’m sure you can put other vegetables in it as well, like carrots and baby corn.  I just didn’t have any.  Also, I was on a budget haha.

Check out my page, Chinese New Year Project, for a look at how much ingredients cost me and other New Year’s dishes! 🐷

❤ I used Epicurious’s recipe as a main reference!

Buddha's Delight


For the Sauce:

  • 2 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1/2 inch piece of ginger, minced
  • 5 tbsp oyster sauce
  • 4 tbsp soy sauce
  • 2 tbsp ShaoXing wine 
  • 1 tbsp sugar
  • 1 tsp sesame oil

Dried Ingredients:

  • 6 shiitake mushrooms
  • 2 dried bean curd skins
  • 3 bunches mung bean noodles

Other:

  • 24 mini deep-fried tofu puffs
  • 6 napa cabbage leaves
  • 2 tbsp vegetable oil
  • ~2 cups water

Prepping

  1. Rehydrate the dried bean curd and shiitake mushrooms: soak the mushrooms in about 2 cups of water, and the bean curds in another bowl of water for at least one hour.  I soaked mine in the morning and took them out 6 hours later.
  2. Squeeze out the remaining water from the mushrooms, reserving the soaking water. Cut the mushrooms into quarter-inch strips.
  3. Drain the bean curd with a colander, and squeeze out the remaining liquid. Cut into one-inch long strips.  
  4. Bring a pot of water to boil.  Once boiling, put the deep-fried tofu pieces in for about 30 seconds.  Doing this will remove the excess oil off of the tofu pieces.  
  5. Drain the tofu in a colander, and cut the pieces diagonally in half, or into bite-sized pieces.  
  6. Cut napa cabbage into 1-inch thick strips.  Set aside.

Directions

  1. Heat oil in a medium-sized wok or large skillet on medium.  Add the minced garlic and ginger to let the flavors absorb into the oil.  
  2. Meanwhile, mix together the remaining sauce ingredients in a small bowl.  
  3. When the oil starts to get hot, quickly add the shiitake mushrooms and bean curd, stir-frying for about 30 seconds. 
  4. Add the tofu puffs.
  5. Pour the sauce into the wok along with the mushroom liquid until it covers all the ingredients. 
  6. Let the mixture come to a boil, and then add the mung bean noodles.
  7. Cover and simmer on low for about 15 minutes (the amount of time it took for the noodles to cook).
  8. Add the napa cabbage, and simmer, uncovered, for about 5 minutes.