I got up quickly, washed as fast as I could, and went downstairs to pick her up.
She crossed the street with a bag in her hand. When she saw me, she said happily, "It's still hot. It's jiaozi with red beans tied with cotton thread and jiaozi with minced meat tied with hemp skin. There are not many packages, I will give you a taste. "
After handing me the zongzi, she said she would go to the market to buy food and told me to have a good breakfast before going to work.
Big sister attaches great importance to traditional festivals. Every holiday, she always makes seasonal food to celebrate, such as making zongzi on the Dragon Boat Festival, baking cakes on the Mid-Autumn Festival, making wonton on the solstice in summer and making osmanthus wine on the solstice in winter. These ceremonies make ordinary life full of warmth and romance.
I saw someone selling zongzi in the vegetable market the other day, and I was still thinking, there is still a period of time before the Dragon Boat Festival, so let's eat zongzi first.
When I was a child, I didn't buy the zongzi at home from the market, but my mother picked it from the reeds in the lake. At that time, Gehu Lake, which we called west taihu lake, was not far from home, and East Taihu Lake was about 30 miles east. There are many rivers connecting the two lakes with the port. On the shore of the lake, there is a long and wide beach with several kilometers of reeds. The women rocked the small wooden boat hand in hand to pick reed leaves. Usually only three or four leaves are the thickest and widest, chirping and singing all the way, and laughter is floating among reeds.
Blanch the picked reed leaves with boiling water and then soak them in cold water to make zongzi.
There are pure dumplings, red bean dumplings and pork dumplings. There are more and more varieties in recent years. According to family tastes, add egg yolk, walnut kernel, dark plum, and so on. My favorite is red bean dumplings, which contain both glutinous rice and the bite of red beans. They are white and red, fragrant and delicious.
The leaves of zongzi are fragrant. When cooking zongzi, the fragrance can float through three rooms. When you come home from school and walk into the yard, you can smell the delicious smell. Can't wait to run to the kitchen and turn around the pot. At that time, grandma would take eggs and duck eggs out of the zongzi pot with a spoon and give them to our brothers and sisters. We can't bear to eat eggs stained with Zongye's fragrance, but put them in carefully woven small net bags and schoolbags to show off and beat eggs in front of classmates.
Dragon Boat Festival began to be busy with farming, harvesting wheat and transplanting rice. At three or four o'clock in the afternoon, the farmers were hungry, rested their feet and peeled the zongzi they had brought from the stalks in the field.
One year during the Dragon Boat Festival, I went to the mountains as a guest. There are no reeds in the mountains. How can they make zongzi? It turns out that they wrap zongzi with bamboo leaves or bamboo leaves. I was very surprised when I saw them, especially when bamboo leaves were not bamboo leaves at all, but bamboo shells that naturally fell off after bamboo shoots became bamboo. I looked it up on Baidu, and found that jiaozi is made of different materials, such as bamboo leaves, peach leaves, banana leaves, lotus leaves and zongzi leaves ... Besides the fragrance, zongzi leaves contain a variety of chlorophyll and amino acids that cover the human body, which has a special antiseptic effect. No wonder zongzi is easy to preserve. It turned out that it was the function of Zongzi leaves, the magic of nature and the wisdom of working people that made the Dragon Boat Festival.
Mother is old, reeds are less, and small wooden boats in rural areas are eliminated. There are no girls and young women in the village who go to pick zongye together. My sister bought zongye in the vegetable market. The woman who sells zongye said that there were more reeds in Taihu Lake in recent years, and some people managed them along the lake to prevent them from being picked at will. These palm leaves are all picked from their own ponds. "
There are more reeds, egrets fly, and Taihu Lake becomes a green trail. On Sunday, I invited several sisters to pick zongzi leaves by Taihu Lake.