Lin Wenyuan
"The jade rat chases the winter, and the golden bull sends the spring." Every time around the Spring Festival, nature will begin to distribute sage grass on the land of southern Fujian. As the saying goes, "When everything grows, the wise man takes it with the times." "In my hometown, on the eighth day of the first lunar month, I have to make this delicacy on the tip of my tongue, rat qu kueh, which is a tradition that has been handed down from generation to generation.
On the first and second days of the first month of the first month, I went to the homes of relatives and friends to take off my new clothes after the end of the year, and picked a good day from the third to the sixth day of the first month of the first month and began to go to the mountains to pick rat grass. Sage grass is covered in turquoise, one plant after another is scattered in every big mountain, some live in the mountains, some live in the fields, some live near the stream... So the search for rats became an indispensable pleasure in my childhood.
My mother told me that sage grass should be tender, and it is best not to flower. The tender sage grass will have more silk, and the taste of the rat koji is the best.
The production process of rat koji is busy, and the preliminary preparation work is also sloppy. First of all, after picking the sage grass, go home to pick out the impurities and clean it. Then, according to personal taste, prepare the filling, the filling can be salty or sweet, salty can be pork belly mushrooms and spring shoots, sweet can be peanut flour mixed with sugar or red bean flour mixed with white sugar, our family is accustomed to eating sweet. Then take out the print mold and wash it dry, and prepare an appropriate amount of edible alkali (baking soda), salt, peanut oil (lard, corn oil, tea oil).
When everything is ready, soak the glutinous rice in water for four hours and then put it in a blender to grind into powder, then put the sage grass into the boiling water in the pot and cook for a while, add a little alkali when cooking, remove it and drain the water and chop it, put it into a blender and stir into puree, then add glutinous rice flour and knead well. Add an appropriate amount of salt, a small amount of baking soda, and a small amount of peanut oil several times during the kneading process. At that time, the fresh smell of green grass came to the face, making people feel like a breeze in the drizzle of March. Next, spread the kneaded dumplings and steam them on the steamer basket, and if you have more weight, you can divide them into two times. After the steaming rat koji is out of the cage, it needs to be stirred evenly with a rolling pin, one is to dissipate heat, and the other is to make the rat koji more tendon and Q bullet.
The dark green rat koji can be made when it is close to hand temperature. Spread plastic wrap on the table, apply a little oil, wash your hands and apply a little oil, roll the rat balls into small agents, pinch flatten them and wrap the filling in, and place them on the table one by one. At this time, children always like to gather around the table, and you have to use a sweet rat koji to send them away. After cooling down a little, the rat koji is printed with a beautiful pattern with a print mold. When all is cool, wrap them one by one with disposable plastic wrap. Put it in the refrigerator and use it on the ninth day of the first lunar month. Some people say that sacrifice is the best way to thank the ancestors, and the rat song during the sacrifice is not only a high respect for the ancestors, but also the most sincere thanks to nature.
The most exciting thing is to eat rat koji after the first ten days, because it is not as hot as it just came out of the oven, so the rat koji must "go down the oil pot", gollum and pour a large bowl of oil, when the oil is seven or eight points hot, use chopsticks to clamp the rat koji one by one and put it down to fry, the body temperature of the rat koji quickly rises, after a minute the surface can be knotted with a layer of crisp skin, at this time we have to turn it over to make it heat evenly, watching its body slowly expand after it can come out of the pot, surrounded by our mother we have long been unable to hold back the excitement of the heart," The saliva was three thousand feet, and my heart was full of rats. Scrambling to hand the bowl to her mother, then her mother would say, "No hurry, no hurry, there are all of them." The moment I got the bowl, I didn't care about the hot mouth, i took a bite, "clicked", the sweetness of the filling combined with the aroma of the weeds, soft and sticky sweet, people can't stop. Nature's grass is gentle and long, the taste of the filling is thick and abundant, the surging dopamine flushes the fat face, and the submerged rich belly lingers on the side for a long time. Of course, the calorie content of the fried rat koji should not be underestimated, and after eating too much, you have to drink a few cups of Tieguanyin to relieve the tiredness.
Although I have grown up now, whenever I eat rat koji in the first month, I still have a sense of ritual, and I can't quit the habit of loving to eat rat koji, after all, it is the taste of childhood...
Lin Wenyuan, female, after 00. A native of Hongyou Village, Gande Town, Anxi County, Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, he is now a third-grade student of Anxi No. 11 Middle School, a member of the Morning Dawn Literature Club, and a small writer of the Qingxi Literary Society. Gentle and quiet, she loves literature, especially reading ancient poems, and often writes in her spare time. Good at prose, like to record the beauty of life with words, prefer simple little happiness. He has published articles on many public accounts, and some works have been published in Quanzhou Evening News.