Although there is still a period of time before Qingming, our rural families have begun to pick Ai Qing, make some Qingming fruits and taste fresh.
On weekends, my mother and I came to the stream in front of the village to pick tender wormwood. After cleaning up, my mother boiled the washed Aiqing in water for a while, and put a little alkali powder in the water, saying that the cooked Aiqing would not turn yellow. Of course, I can't figure out why. When Ai Qing was cooking, my mother put the ground rice noodles into the pot and began to knead the dough while it was hot.
When I first started making olives, my mother unscrewed a green powder ball, kneaded it into a "small bowl" with her thumb and forefinger, and put in a spoonful of stuffing. My mother said, "You can't put too much stuffing, or you will twist the lace." When I said I was dancing, lace was beautiful and neat. I was dumbfounded. I just opened my mouth wide and forgot the tricks my mother said.
My mother told me the origin of Qingming fruit while making it: It is said that one year in Tomb-Sweeping Day, Taiping Chen, the general of Li Xiucheng of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, was chased by Qing soldiers, and a farmer nearby came forward to help, disguised Taiping Chen as a farmer and plowed the fields with him. Taiping Chen was not caught, and the Qing soldiers didn't stop there, so they sent more soldiers to set up posts in the village, and everyone who left the village had to be inspected to prevent them from bringing food to Taiping Chen. When he got home, the farmer slipped on a clump of wormwood and was thinking about what to bring to Taiping Chen. When he got up, he saw that his hands and knees were stained with green. He immediately took care of it, quickly picked some wormwood and went home, washed it, boiled it, squeezed it into glutinous rice flour and made it into zongzi. Then put the green jiaozi in the grass and mix with the sentry at the village entrance. Taiping Chen ate this green ball and felt fragrant, waxy and non-sticky. After dark, he bypassed the Qing army post and returned to the base camp safely. Later, Li Xiucheng ordered the Taiping Army to learn to be a youth league to defend itself against the enemy. The custom of eating dumplings spread.
Then, my mother told my hometown people that there are two kinds of green fruits: sweet and salty. Processing Qingming grass and appropriate amount of glutinous rice flour into skin, filling it with bean paste, pressing it into a circular mold and steaming to obtain sweet fruit; Add diced winter bamboo shoots, dried bean curd, kimchi stuffing, etc. And make them into salty and transparent fruits in the shape of jiaozi.
While listening to my mother's introduction, I watched my mother's appearance and practiced making olives by myself. I rubbed a rice noodle ball, rolled it in my hand like glutinous rice balls, and then kneaded it into thin and round dough with my fingers, then put the stuffing in the middle of the dough and wrapped it like a jiaozi. At first, the bag was clumsy, and the lace of the olive was twisted and deformed. However, I didn't give up. I learned a lesson from my failure: the skin should not be too thin, but thicker in the middle, so that the wrapped olives won't break. After wrapping a few and making some decent olives, my mother praised me for my progress.
Looking at the olives in the sieve, I couldn't help laughing.