Rice Dumpling Aka ZongZi

The yearly Dumpling Festival is just a couple of days away which falls on Wednesday, 16 June 2010. I am sure these few days you can smell the aroma of the mouth drooling dumpling circulating around your neighbourhood area as some families are busy with the wrapping and cooking of this festive food. And as usual a few weeks to a month before the festival, most of Chinese restaurants will create all kinds of festive dumplings using some special ingredients in order to attract more customers.

Although the traditional Nonya and Cantonese rice dumplings are good, but most often we are still looking forward to delicious new creations to satisfy our taste buds. Recently I read from a food magazine that this year Cherry Garden offer a special “Lychee Braised Pork Belly Dumpling” which consists of ingredients likes dried lychees and braised pork belly flavoured with lychee liqueur. I wonder how it will taste as normally we only used cooking wine instead of fruit wine as seasoning. But I am sure this will taste great with lychee flavour.

No matter where is your choice to get the best rice dumplings or you are intending to make some before the festival. I am sure there is always something suitable for you everyone. The “Savory Pork Dumpling - 咸肉粽” shown in the photos above are made by my Mother-in-law. Sometime I just wonder in this modern society, is it only those older generations folks are willing to spend time and effort in the kitchen making all these traditional foods. Because most youngest like us tend to buy read-made products instead of spending the whole day preparing and making these time consuming food.

But if you are interested to try, there is a Rice Dumpling making post(with video) in my recipe blog that you might like to read more about it. (click Here)