Text: Sun Yanbing
Figure: From the network
I remember when I was young, in the countryside of our hometown of Huaiyin, every year during the Spring Festival, my family would steam a lot of steamed buns, buns, etc. Especially steamed buns, people with a large population will sometimes steam one or two hundred, which can be eaten in the spring of the following year.
When my mother was there, she would still make a cage of sweet potato sticky rice cakes.
This should be a local specialty, I have asked friends here in Lianyungang many times, do they have the habit of making sweet potato sticky rice cake in the New Year.
They all said no, not even heard of the name.
Of course, there will also be cakes in Lianyungang, in addition to the packaged cakes eaten in the New Year, which are the kind of cakes that are not large and conical made with glutinous rice flour or potato flour on the street in the morning. One person can operate one machine, and one or two companies on a street will make it, and it will be eaten early. If anyone's family will buy some if they want to move or when students take the exam, it is a blessing, which means "high promotion" or "high school".
The main ingredients of sweet potato glutinous rice cake are glutinous rice flour and cooked sweet potato, and for some people who especially like to eat sweets, some sugar will be added appropriately. In fact, the sweet potato itself contains a certain amount of sugar, even if no additional sugar is added, it is relatively sweet to eat.
The process of sweet potato sticky rice cake is simple and not complicated to make.
However, usually few people do it, most of them will do it by the way when steaming steamed steamed buns in the New Year, and they also have the meaning of praying for blessings.
The peeled sweet potatoes are cooked and kneaded together with the glutinous rice flour, kneaded evenly, spread on the basket of steamed cakes, like an enlarged version of the pie, wait for it to wake up for a while, steam with the steamed buns, about an hour or so to cook, you can eat.
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At this time, we will take the basketed sweet potato glutinous rice cake outside to cool, and the sweet potato glutinous rice cake that is very soft at the beginning will slowly harden. In order to facilitate preservation, it is often cut into small pieces with a knife and stored. When you want to eat it, you put it on the basket and steam it again, and the taste is still good.
Sweet potato sticky rice cake is my mother's favorite.
Every time I eat it, I always look sweet.
This feeling, perhaps only we as children will deeply feel and understand, especially the mood of eating cakes at different ages is not exactly the same.
When you are young, on the one hand, you love it, and on the other hand, you yearn for a happy and beautiful life.
Because my father died early, the burden of the family fell prematurely on my mother alone, and it can be said that she grew up with five of our sisters by her own strength, and the hardships suffered during this period are also unimaginable to ordinary people.
Despite this, she has always been full of love for life, busy all day long, not complaining, not backing down, not running away, believing that good days will come.
To be honest, my mother's positive and optimistic attitude to life also had a great impact on the later lives of our sisters. In the years that followed, our sisters also lived a good life almost on their own independent struggles.
What touched and remembered us the most was her support for our education, and no matter how hard the days were, she never let any of us drop out of school and go home to help her work.
Although she was illiterate, she knew that only going to school in the countryside at that time could better change a person's destiny.
One year, in order to buy a set of college entrance examination revision materials for her eldest brother, she even sold the fans at home who were ready to keep it for the New Year.
Perhaps it was the sincerity of the mother that touched the heavens, that year, the eldest brother was successfully admitted to a normal school and became the first college student in our village, the mother was very happy, and the whole village was even more surprised.
Under the leadership of the eldest brother, four of our five sisters have obtained secondary school or above through hard work and have a good job, which is unique in our village in the 1980s.
When I was old, my mother's eating of sweet potato sticky rice cake was a kind of bitter enjoyment, and it was also a kind of memory of the past years of suffering.
In 1992, as the youngest in my family, I also graduated from secondary school and joined the work, and I had a job and income of my own. The next year, at the initiative of the eldest brother, each of our sisters took out a part of the money every year to make a pension fund for my mother. The money was stored in a special account with my sister and used when my mother was old.
After many years of rolling, by the time my mother was sixty years old, the pension fund had a certain size. The sister, like a salary, delivered the money to her mother on time every month.
Mother never worried about money like before, life is very comfortable, want to live in the countryside for a while, when you don't want to live, go to the county brothers and sisters' home, or the third brother from other places and I live here for a period of time, so that many people of the same age in the village are very envious.
Nowadays, with the improvement of living standards and the sharp decline in rural residents, even in the New Year, no one will steam steamed buns and buns as before, let alone steamed potato glutinous rice cakes, all of which have become a memory, a memory.
Occasionally, when I think about it, it feels very warm, as if I am back in the past.