The new year flavor | roasted rice dumplings

After the Spring Festival passes every year, only the grilled rice dumplings with a wisp of fragrance not only bring a strong New Year flavor to my hometown, but also bring me a mouth full of saliva.

With the arrival of the annual Spring Festival, when people in their hometown beat the rice dumplings, cut them into pieces, and roasted them around the brazier stove to eat, with the fragrance of the grilled rice dumplings, the New Year flavor began to gradually become stronger.

When I was a child, every month, my parents borrowed stone mortars from the village, and as long as they were made, cooled, and cut into pieces, I would take a few pieces every three or five minutes, go to the brazier of the fire, use a tong, open a slit, lay it on the brazier, put a string of rice dumplings, and roast it back and forth.

At that time, the family used old porcelain pots or tile bowls for fire. Most of the fuel used to make a fire is chaff, chaff and sawn wood ash. Because I was a little sloppy and did not master the technology of roasting rice dumplings, I often either roasted them with burnt spots on them or turned them over with fire ash. Despite this, the rice dumplings are still fragrant and delicious to eat.

The years flow like water, and the times change. After I was more than ten years old, every year during the Spring Festival, the fuel used to make a fire in the brazier or stove at home was charcoal and coal, and our family roasted rice dumplings, not only with fire tongs, but also sometimes with chopsticks. In this way, in the case of grasping the heat, the baked rice dumplings are swollen like a snow-white cotton cake, and the aroma is ethereal and mouth-watering.

Thirty years later, I live in the city, I am nearly old, every year during the Spring Festival, I will return to my hometown in the countryside, from the Chinese New Year's Eve to the fifteenth day of the first month, I often have to take some pieces of rice dumplings, baked for my children and grandchildren to eat, I can't help but eat a few pieces.

However, now that I roast rice dumplings in my hometown, the tools and equipment I use are no longer things like braziers and fire bowls, but clean and hygienic electric stoves and ovens.

It can be said that in the countryside of my hometown, every time the Spring Festival comes, the aroma and customs of grilled rice dumplings have drunk the peasant family and the countryside, which has become a year that is frozen in the depths of my heart and can never be erased.

Source: Qianxian Daily Author: Chen Qingyan