Therefore, I am going to post photos of rice dumplings too.
Wait wait, there's more! It's not just rice dumplings, but the MAKING of rice dumplings.
When it comes to rice dumpling, there is only one option for me - grandma's rice dumplings.
Even on the small island of Taiwan, there are different styles of dumplings. The north and the south. The north rice dumpling is thinner and longer and the rice isn't as softly cooked as the south. The south dumplings are fatter and is boiled in water for a good few hours so that the sticky rice is thoroughly cooked. My grandma is quite well-known among friends and family for her rice dumplings. No one else makes better dumplings than her, so everyone will get the dumplings from her during the festival time.
Dumpling making is a lot of work. Before the ingredients get wrapped in leaves, they have to be prepped first. Rice has to be soaked. Peanuts have to be roasted. Pork has to be cooked. Egg york has to be removed... blah blah. The wrapping and cooking, and of course the eating are the easy part. Of course, I am sure at the end of the day, the satisfaction from the delicious taste on family's face is the priceless part for my grandma.
So here it goes:
1. Prepare the leaves. My grandparents used to grow the leaves themselves, but this year, they bought them from the market. They will wash them at least three times because they are just not comfortable with the suspicion of pesticide on the leaves, so that's a lot of work to begin with.
Here, grandma folds the leave in a funnel shape skillfully and ready to put the first scoop pf ingredients in.
2. Peanut and sticky rice mixture.
The majority of the rice dumpling is of course, rice. Not just regular rice, but sticky rice. As mentioned before, the rice has to be soaked and dry-fried first.
3. Mushrooms
Mushrooms are marinated and cooked first.
4. Egg york. The Egg york are not just regular yorks. I think they are duck egg yorks, pre-cooked and seasoned. I love them!
5. Other ingredients. Usually this will be pork, but my grandma is vegetarian and so are many friends and family. Therefore, she uses soy based food to substitute for the meat.
6. More rice to cover the ingredients.
7. Wrapping the dumpling. Here's the really tricky part. The dumpling has to be tightly wrapped so that nothing will escape in the 3 hours of boiling. However, the leaves cannot be too tight either to prevent it from breaking up. Watching my grandma doing it looks so easy. Her hands moves like they are young and energetic. However, this is years of experience in action.
8. Gramdma finishes the wrapping with strings to tie the leaves and into a bunch for easy handling.
9. Repeat the process all over again, one dumpling at a time! It's all love!
10. Starting the fire!
Even when there is a kitchen with gas stove, my grandparents still prefer to use fire wood. They claim that the fire is stronger and more stable. Easier said than done. This means my grandpa has to sit in front of the fire stove to regulate the air flow and heat, as well as feeding the fire wood. It's ok, let's watch the master at work.
"Man of Mystery"!!! a.k.a grandpa
Watching the water trickle as time passed.....
THREE HOURS UP!!!!
11. Welcome to world debut of the famous grandma rice dumplings!!!
Bunches of fresh hot dumplings hung for cooling since we are not going to be eating all of them at once.
Moment of silence.....
OH YEAH!!!!!
So what's the big deal here. Well, there's always a philosophical part to my blog entries. This isn't an exception.
My grandma is known for her dumplings. Everyone praise her wrapping skills. So I asked her how she learnt to do it better than the average joe. She said.... and here's the enlightening part.... "When I was a kid, we had no toys, so I started to play with dirt by trying to wrap it with leaves...."
Moment of slience in my mind......
Enlightenment!
As someone who makes things for a living, there's a lot of social responsibilities that lies within my profession. What I make, how I make, why I make. It's just as much on the target user as it is on me. "What is value" becomes the question that I have always been asking as well as to remind myself with. This answer from my grandma triggered me to think about this in comparison between generations and social conditions. Let's look at today first. We live in a world full of things. The variety is beyond our ability to grasp. We are in no real need to acquire most of the things that we own, to a point that there is no real value in anything we have today. Still, we seek recognition and identity association from objects bought from stores, and never able to find one that truly represents the "self".
Then let's reflect upon my grandma's answer. It was a handful of dirt in a random leaf, turned into a lifetime of family bonding and this long essay of enlightening and nutritious crap. In a time where there was nothing, everything is something. The lack of resources forces a person to see the value in everything around him. A handful of dirt + a random leave = game time. Emptied dried gourd = water container. Dried gourd fiber = all natural scotch scrub pad. There was no waste because everything is valuable in its own way. Everything has it's own natural landing place..... how ironic when we compared it to today's over stocked retail store shelves full of things that are "off-season" or "obsolete". How have we evolved to this point where we have lost the ability to recognize value? Oh wait, "evolve" isn't the right word. It should be "retard"!
Being an object maker, I live in a world of contradictions. I make things that eventually will become garbage, therefore I am a garbage maker. I literally design stuffs that I don't believe in because of helpless reasons. I am in a system, I have to find a way to live with it. As for my values? I don't know, I just know that I am not living it yet.
