It’s Winter Solstice Festival tomorrow.
For someone like me who is always thinking of food… it symbolizes tang yuan (glutinous rice balls).
When I was a child, I used to make it with my grandmother and mother. It was fun playing dough. After cooking it, I would refuse to eat it as I did not like the taste of it.
‘Eat it and you will be one year older’
‘It’s everybody’s birthday’
So I would eat just 1.
I started to learn to like it when I was in Glasgow. My friend who loves eating it so much that she used to make it every pot luck gathering we had. She would bring glutinous rice flour and ginger to make the basic traditional tang yuan. Eventually I started cooking it.
The traditional one was just plain tang yuan with ginger sugar soup base. I had white and red (red colouring) ones.
Nowadays there are many types:
- Soup base: red bean soup, black sesame soup
- Filling: peanut filling, sweet potato filling, peanut filling, sesame seed filling, red bean filling
- Glutinous rice mix: sweet potato tang yuan
Sweet Potato Tang Yuan
Ingredients: Sweet potato, ginger, sugar, glutinous rice flour, water
1. I used leftover sweet potato refrigerated overnight from here. You can boil it or steam it.
2. Mash up the sweet potato
3. Add glutinous rice flour and sugar(optional) and make a dough.
4. Roll it into a circle and then drop it into boiling water
6. When it is floating, it means that it is cooked. Scoop it up into a bowl with cool/ room temperature water and put it aside.
7. To make the soup base, boil water, ginger and sugar for about 5 minutes.
8. Put tang yuan into the soup base.