Courtesy photo: Rednet forum @ Stupid Cuckoo
In Western Hunan Province, there is a unique kind of rice called she rice, also called "silly rice". The main rice is made of she-annese (phoenix called water artemisia), bacon, wild onion (phoenix dialect shallot), glutinous rice and so on, mixed together and cooked, mainly after the spring.
When spring blossoms, everything awakens, and artemisia annua and shallots emerge from the ground.
Artemisia annua is a green herb that is everywhere in xiangxi, on field paths, in front of and behind houses. The taste is bitter and can be used medicinally. If you are not careful with a knife wound or impact, pick a little and put it in your mouth to chew, and then apply it to the wound, you can stop the bleeding immediately, and the wound will not be inflamed, let alone purulent.
When cooking a social meal, the required materials must be prepared in advance, the process is not too cumbersome, and the time is not too long.
In the morning, take a small hoe and a bamboo basket and get back the water artemisia and shallots. Artemisia annua is everywhere and comes at your fingertips. Shallots are a bit laborious, shallots are generally on the field or in the barren land, if you know the place, you will dig up two or three pounds in an hour; if you can't find it, at the end of the day, a pound is difficult to find.
After the artemisia annua is found, wash it, rub it vigorously, knead it into balls, cut into small pieces, the finer the better, and then find a clean gauze to wrap it up, squeeze it hard, let the bitter juice inside the artemisia annua juice squeeze out, squeeze it a few times, and the color of the community rice that comes out of this way will not have a bitter taste. Finally, the squeezed-dried artemisia annua is dried in an iron pot so that the fragrance of the artemisia annua will come to the nose.
Finely chop the washed shallots and place on a plate.
Take the bacon from the stove room and burn it on the skin over a charcoal fire, so that the community meal will be overflowing with flavor. Then wash and cut into diced bacon, sauté in oil and set aside.
When the glutinous rice (which can be mixed with a small amount of sticky rice) is boiled until the rice soup is scooped, the dried artemisia annua, the chopped shallots and the sautéed bacon are poured into the pot, stirred with the glutinous rice and simmered over low heat.
Cooked community rice, the color is light green with yellow, smells, both the sweet aroma of glutinous rice, the deliciousness of bacon, and the fragrance of shallots, eating into the mouth, soft and delicious, oily but not greasy, refreshing. Especially the pot, overflowing with fragrance, makes people salivate!
【Event Introduction】
Focus on Huxiang cuisine and convey the happiness and warmth behind it. "2021 Taste of Hunan: Let's Sunbathe the Taste of Hunan in Your Heart" activity opened, with the theme of Huxiang cuisine, let's explore the soul of Hunan taste.