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.
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
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
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.
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!
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.
Prayers 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.
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...
Ofcourse I did. I documented first then I helped roll the dough ler. Anyway after about half an hour of rolling, my second aunt, my eldest cousin sister and my cousin brother went out to the living room to watch One in a Million leaving my eldest aunty, myself and my younger cousin sis to do all the rolling on our own.
I remember when I was in primary school, one of my cousins made a penis shaped Tang Yuen without any adults noticing. After that my cousin tried to eat it himself. The look of his face when trying to eat that Tang Yuen = priceless That aside, am I the only one here who doesn't like to eat Tang Yuen? I only eat satu biji every year because my mom forces me to eat it
LOL!! Is he gay? Is it so bad? It's actually more or less tasteless what. It's the "soup" that matters the most, I think.
I know a lot of people who makes just half-decent tang yuen probably the reason why you don't like it haha.(no offence to your mum though )The trip to the temple clearly showed how disgusting tang yuen can be to look yet, i shudder to think how they would taste like. Tang yuen, when made correctly should have a similar texture to the japanese mochi and is sweet due to the sugar syrup. least, that's my opinion of good tang yuen. i've tasted some really bad ones which have as much texture as a soggy wad of cotton and tasteless syrup. blech. Probably the result of immediately dropping the just-rolled balls into the boiling water. tang yuen loses it's shaped and rubbry texture when boiled for too long. That's what my aunt told me anyway.
LOL! No, he is straight We were still kids back then I never know there are good and bad Tang Yuen They all look and taste the same to me that's what I always thought.
