粽子 making day

It's the time of the year where I looked forward to every year. When I was young, my mum will make dumpling every year for our family. It will be a big project, having to clean the bamboo leaves, prepare the ingredients, wrapping the dumplings and lastly, the long cooking process. There were years where my aunt will come and teach my mum to make the Nonia dumpling, and we had such fun time wrapping and chatting away. 

Then as we moved to Perth, mum never made them anymore. So I just had to settle with the store bought variety in the Asian grocery shops (which were made fresh every week and they have my favourite Nonia dumpling too!)

As I moved away for the five long years of study in Melbourne, the land lady whom I stayed with will often share some of the dumplings she made with me. Though it's different flavour, it's still good.

Then God placed me in Canberra, where no one made them (let alone selling the bamboo leave), so my cravings for my fav dumplings only happens when I go back to Perth for the store bought ones.

And this year, I thought to myself, why not make it at home? And so I did!! I declared Friday as my 'holiday', and made dumplings!

I consulted mummy for the ingredients for flavouring the meat. 

Here, I had Mui Choi, Da Tou Choi, and Choi Bo, stir fried with onion, garlic and the marinated fatty pork. Fatty pork is a must for dumplings! 

I marinate the pork with dark soy sauce, sugar and five spice powder.

I use the pressure cooker to pre-cook the peanuts and black eye pea. Then I mixed it into the fried glutinous rice. The glutinous rice was washed, soaked for 1 hr, drained, and then fried with oil, garlic, onion, five spice powder, dark soy and sugar.

The rest of the ingredients were the dried prawns and Chinese mushrooms. Both were soaked in water to regain its shape.

I also defrosted my two pack of frozen boiled chestnuts which I we collected in March.

A close up of my glutinous mixed rice. Stir frying it helps to flavour the rice.

What's making dumplings without the bamboo leaves! I had to cook the leaves in boiling water to soften the stem. After that, I use the water to wash the leaves one by one in the laundry sink.

Now all ingredients were ready, let's start wrapping! 

Fold the leaves.

Add a small spoon of rice mix at the bottom.

Add the ingredients, dried prawns, mushroom, chestnuts.

Then the fatty pork with generous amount of veges.

Top up with more rice.

Fold the leaves down like a lid.

Make sure the top n edges are secure n well wrapped.

And fold the 'lid' to one side to seal the edges.

To properly seal the package, tie the string around it.

And tada! The dumpling is done!

I use the pressure cooker to cook the dumplings. It was so quick! Plus not needing to watch the time n water level. I can only put one bunch (10) each time, but that was ok.

Here it is! Freshly out of the pot!

Let's try first to see if the rice was cooked and dumpling was well seasoned.

Yummmm! Loves the fragrance of the bamboo leaves infused in the rice.

There were so irresistible. I have to eat at least two for each meal. Haha.

Here's a snapshot my dear Eric had taken of me in my wrapping action. N there's the pressure cooker at the back, cooking the dumplings.

Hope you all have a great weekend too!

Kcan