Tang Chek / Tang Yuen / Winter Solstice Festival

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One of my favourite chinese festival ever! Took these pictures as my aunts and gma were busy making tang yuen.

1. & 2. Aunt kneading the sugar and glutinous rice flour. It's hard work. She has to knead till all the sugar has melted which takes a lot of time and stamina.
3. the dough all separated to 4-5 blobs
4. grams starts boiling the pandan leaves + sugar.. i can't remember what it was for though... but i think it must have been for the sugar syrup
5. grams adding the pandan coloring to one of the giant dough balls.

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1. Coloring the glutinous rice.
2. Boiled pandan leaves
3. Grams testing out to see if the colour of the glutinous rice is vibrant enough.
4. she added more coloring and continued to knead
5. kneading the red color glutinous rice blob

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1. Finished now-turned-pink glutinous rice dough
2. Grams kneading the yellow glutinous rice dough
3. Ready to roll yellow glutinous rice dough
4. My fav colour, blue!
5. You can see how particularly sticky and gooey this one is

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3., 4. & 5. : Some pictures of the natural coloring that my grams used to colour the glutinous rice balls. The beautiful indigo color is made from a certain kind of blue morning glory (least I THINK it's a morning glory) which grows nearby my gram's house. She picks them and then leaves them out to dry in the sun. She then puts the dried flowers in a bowl and adds a little but of water to extract the beautiful blue color when she needs to.

The green coloring was made from pandan leaves which were pounded in the pestle and mortar then squeezed through a masking cloth. This particular batch is quite potent as no water was added into the mixture. It's all pure pandan juice.

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1. Tua Ee (eldest aunt) lays out the masking cloth on the table and proceeds to pinching out little bits of the dough for us to start rolling them into balls.

2. Ji Ee helps Tua Ee to roll

3. Everyone joins in to roll the first batch of white glutinous rice balls.

4. the 12 biggest glutinous rice balls to represent the 12 months of the year

5. more balls!

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1. All five colours. Each one of those balls were rolled at least 3 times. This is because the more one rolls the dough, the more springy and chewy it becomes. It also helps the balls to hold their shape much better.

2. & 3.The finished product. Everything cooked and ready to be eaten the next morning. I had wanted to wake up early to take more pictures of my grams cooking it but... I woke up too late Oh well, least I get to eat it hehe! I love how beautiful all the colors look together in one bowl

PS: She had boiled the balls separately in order to retain their colours then she adds everything into the syrup in order to keep the syrup nice and clear.

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Tang chek is not all about eating the balls but also a time to visit our dead relatives and ancestors. So we all went to several different temples to offer them the tang chek that we have made. My grams was telling me and my cousins how many chinese people nowadays not only do not bother going through the trouble of making tang yuen but don't bother to pay a visit to their dead family members either except during Cheng Beng.


Here are some photos I took from the first temple. ( I didn't take anymore after that)

2. I tried taking a picture to compare the *ahem* other 'competitors' tang yuen to the ones we made but my aunt was eyeing at me, indirectly telling me that it is not nice But if you can see, the ones in the little red bowls with the spoons are ours. the rest are made by other people who have come to pay their respects to their dead as well. No one else I know have ever made blue tang yuen before. and every one else's tang yuen is so big and out of shape and the syrup is so foggy!

3. the Altar.

4. My aunt 'asking' our dead relatives if they have finished their meal of tang yuen using two 50sen coins and throwing tossing them into the air. I can't remember how they determine yes or no but i just know that if both coins have the same face facing up, it either means yes or no and if both are different then it either means 'maybe' or you gotta toss them again.

[Chai]

Wow! So many different colours!

[cypris]

Originally Posted by Chai

Wow! So many different colours!

Yup! Very pretty, no?

[Dashken]

Wow... first time I see got green and blue. Nice!

Eh, you didn't help?

For the coins...
one open, one close = yes
both close = no
both open = laughing, etc. lol...