Although there is an old saying that "when you enter the twelfth lunar month, it is the New Year", now, the excitement of the New Year seems to have started since childhood. Jiaozi unveiled her veil for the first time at the beginning of the grand Spring Festival.
Jiaozi will always be the most important role in China's New Year dinner table. Jiaozi means to make friends when you are young. No matter how the year passes, jiaozi in the Spring Festival will always be a year-end feast for the whole family. "Comfortable but lying down, delicious but jiaozi." Jiaozi is delicious, and the stuffing in jiaozi is changeable, which makes people never tire of eating more.
In my hometown, dumpling stuffing is always a classic leek pork stuffing. The leek is tender and juicy, and the leek just bought and picked is greener. The family sat together, with some newspapers on the ground, picking leeks together. The taste of the year and the taste of home are here, slowly sublimating. Pork is best cut by hand and can be chewed clearly one by one. It's better to have some fat. The fat but not greasy pork combined with the fresh fragrance of leeks perfectly explained the taste of that year.
Jiaozi is the best combination of leek and pork, but the jiaozi you want to eat at midnight on New Year's Eve is vegetarian. The older generation said that this symbolizes simplicity and peace in the coming year. I don't quite believe this statement, but jiaozi with plain stuffing is really tasty.
Chop carrots, vermicelli and tofu, spread an egg roll and cut it into small pieces, and sometimes add some fungus. Vegetarian dumpling stuffing can't get rid of this set, but these simple ingredients can set off delicious stuffing. Vegetarian stuffing is not as strong as meat stuffing, but it has a light feeling, which can also play a good regulatory role in the big fish and big meat in the Spring Festival. However, what puzzles me is that sometimes vegetarian stuffing is also called vegetarian stuffing-perhaps vegetarian stuffing is just people's sustenance for a better life and the satisfaction of early adopters.
Dumpling skins are also very particular. You have to use dead noodles, that's for sure. If you put yeast, it will turn into boiled buns. In recent years, a new kind of "jiaozi powder" has been developed, which is said to be specially used to make dough. In fact, it tastes chewy and is no different from ordinary dumpling wrappers. Rolling noodles is really a craft. It pays attention to the thick middle and thin sides. It's not easy to roll fast and well. Now the butcher shop sells dumpling skins pressed by machines, and some flour is thrown between the two skins, which looks lifeless and tastes ordinary.
Whenever I eat jiaozi, I always drink a bowl of clear soup cooked by jiaozi, saying that "the original soup becomes the original dish". In fact, regardless of nutrition, clear soup tastes good: the color of clear soup is light yellow with the flavor of whole grains, and the taste is as light as dumpling skin and as delicious as jiaozi meat-so when making jiaozi, jiaozi is still essential! After drinking a bowl of soup, I felt warm all over, and the cold dissipated, which also diluted the salty taste of eating jiaozi just now.
When eating jiaozi, there are always several jadeite figures, that is Laba garlic. Take a bite of jiaozi and Laba garlic, and the spicy taste is scattered in the umami flavor, which relieves the greasy meat in jiaozi and the spicy taste of Laba garlic. It can be said that it is the best of both worlds! Rice vinegar, soft candy and garlic are planted in glass bottles (originally porcelain jars and glass jars), and a bottle of green Laba garlic can be harvested at a young age. This year, my Laba garlic is emerald green, but the vinegar is grass green, which does not meet Mr. Lao She's standard of "beautiful color, fragrance and taste".
Speaking of off-year, it seems that there is still a long-lost custom: eating Guandong sugar at the altar. In downtown Jinan, the custom of offering sacrifices to stoves has long since disappeared, and there are fewer and fewer kwantung sugar and honeydew melons. But this year I was lucky enough to find a bar of kwantung sugar. Guandong sugar is very crisp, sometimes a bite will splash a lot of dregs, but the sweetness is refreshing, which can't be compared with the soft white sugar in the kitchen, adding a layer of Chinese New Year fragrance and making people very comfortable.
I once ate a white rice cake in Fujian: it tasted good, but the taste was extremely single, as if I were biting glutinous rice balls. Yellow rice cakes in Shandong are different. The raw material is yellow glutinous rice flour. When kneading dough, directly put the whole washed red dates in, just like a part of the dough is ground out, and enter the yellow wheat, where it is kneaded into the shape of a nest and steamed in a pot. When eating yellow rice cakes, the closer you are to the dates, the stronger the flavor of the dates. You should always be alert to being bitten by jujube stones. How interesting!
When it comes to rice cakes, you can't help but say bean buns. Bean buns pay attention to the beauty of the heart, which is actually the importance of stuffing. The night before making bean buns, put sugar in big red dates and red beans, boil them and stew them. The next morning, the stuffing was almost stewed, sweet and soft, and it was even more delicious when eaten directly. I immediately put the bread into the steamer and made some steamed buns together. Steamed bean buns are ordinary in appearance, but red inside, which is beautiful and delicious.
The last thing I want to introduce, which is my favorite, is the crispy pot. My aunt is the only one of my relatives who has the skill of making a pot, but strangely, my grandmother can't. I don't know how to make a crispy pot. Probably just cook your favorite dishes and stew them with some seasoning. Finally, after the juice is collected and cooled, each dish not only retains a little original flavor, but also has an unspeakable fragrance. The crispy rice is delicious only when it is cold, but it can be frozen when it is cold, which makes people uncomfortable and is also a special member of the Spring Festival cuisine. There is a crispy pot seller in our community. When the lid is lifted, there will be bursts of hot air. What kind of crispy pot is this? His crispy pot also has several miles of soup, which tastes so ordinary that some people even buy it! So I decided never to eat his again.
There are crispy Chinese cabbage, crispy tofu, crispy fish, crispy chicken, crispy beans, crispy kelp, crispy mushrooms, crispy fungus and so on. Anything can be put in. My favorite is crispy kelp.
The Spring Festival is not only a grand festival, but also the spiritual sustenance of hundreds of millions of people in China. I sincerely hope that these delicacies can be solidified into the flavor of the year on the tip of the tongue, passed down from generation to generation and looked forward to every year.