Cornmeal porridge, making noodle swallows, and eating eggs.
As the saying goes, "Qingming breaks the snow, but not the snow; Guyu breaks the frost, but not the frost." It is again the time when the glacier opens and the swallows return. The mountains of the wild vegetables also shook off the body of the soil, spit out the tender buds, show that the oily green dress. The apricot tree in front of the house, every year before the cold food festival, blooming her beautiful pink dandan face; under the eaves of the chattering geese, tirelessly to come to the soil busy repair or build a new nest. Spring, and the footsteps of the light came!
All things spring, the countryside is also busy. The festival of cold food is considered a grand festival in spring. The village mothers-in-law are also busy organizing all kinds of delicacies for the Cold Food Festival. According to the custom of Qixia Nanxiang in Yantai, they have to prepare noodle swallows for pasta, glutinous millet for mixed grains, bean cakes made of beans and grains, and soybean sprouts to symbolize the birth of the family.
Mixed corn is a time-consuming and laborious one. It is mainly glutinous corn, sorghum and wheat, after processing, made of a mixture of porridge rice, during the Cold Food Festival to the Qingming Festival, every morning a big bowl of beautiful drink. Processing is in the pestle and mortar with a little water, the corn, sorghum, wheat for repeated pawing, pounding, dehulling. Then the pounded grains are dried, fanned with a dustpan, and rubbed by hand several times to clean the skins. The woman who pounds, fans and rubs the grains is one of the major sights of the village in this season.
The use of corn, when the use of glutinous corn is preferred, made out of porridge sticky, but also very sweet. The first thing you need to do is to pick out the sorghum seeds that are full of particles, and eat them with a chewy texture. In the old generation, this sorghum red porridge is to make people love and hate food, can fill the stomach but digestion is also more laborious. Wheat with the most primitive barley is more delicious, but the peeling time is too much trouble. There is a folk song that describes it: "No matter how much you rub it, no matter how much you pound it, you can't get a piece of grass out of your butt." That is to say, the hulls of the barley in the cracks can not be cleaned, so now all use wheat. Generally with a little red beans, cowpeas, peas, peanuts, and now there are large dates, cinnamon, wolfberries, etc. boiled in a large iron pot. The finer the processing, the better the porridge, which is how many people out of the country, day and night thinking about the taste of home.
The proverbial "don't take the beanbag as dry food", in Qixia beanbag is called bean cakes. In the past, the beans and cakes is this time to eat. The key to the production of bean cakes on the filling: bean filling is not only red bean paste, is dried groundnut, red beans, cowpeas and other grains, steamed in the pot, in the pestle and mortar in the pounding, and then mixed with sugar, made of dough. Then the dough is made into dough and wrapped like a bun and steamed. This food is the most filling, back a few decades ago, in the countryside want to eat a meal is not easy.