粽子, or
"zongzi" - green leafy packages tied up with string (definitely one of our favorite things). There's just something about the plump, familiar pyramidal shape, the comfortable weight of it in your hand, the distinct aroma of those leaf wrappers emanating from the stove, the way it playfully tumbles out when unwrapped. Wes and I both have very fond childhood memories revolving around these traditional Chinese sticky rice tamales. Much like the custom of making Christmas cookies in American households, preparing
zongzi was a treat that generations of Chinese children looked forward to on the fifth day of the fifth month of each lunar year, "
Duanwu Jie," also known as the Dragon Boat Festival. But, as we were both raised in second-generation Chinese-American families, we never got to experience (the torture of) making them ourselves. All we did was eat them...until last weekend.
Wes tells me that he used to always look forward to receiving
zongzi as a child; he remembers coming home to see a bag of them hanging from the doorknob with newspapers and tangerines. His mom would get lots of hand-wrapped
zongzi from her family of ten, so multiple people made them and you never knew what you were gonna get inside, though he always hoped for the fatty pork bits and peanuts, and avoided the egg yolks. Nowadays, Wes's aunts have ensured that we always have an ongoing
zongzi inventory in our freezer, unloading sacks of them every year during the Dragon Boat Festival around this time, during Chinese New Year sometimes, and even on Thanksgiving if they felt like it. Many a
zongzi has come to the rescue when we didn't have time to cook dinner after work.
For me, I remember getting to eat them every once in a while when my mom special-orders them from a lady who makes them at home (pretty much the
zongzi blackmarket of Irvine)...but they never seemed to compare to the ones in Taiwan. Even if it wasn't necessarily around the Dragon Boat Festival holiday,
zongzi was one of those things that we had to buy and eat when we went to my grandma's place in Taipei. We would walk over to the Nanmen Market and pick some out from one of those stalls where they handmake them. I've always favored the ones with the shiitake mushrooms inside, and the browner the rice, the better (because it would have been drenched in soy sauce!). I, unlike Wes, avoided the peanuts. My family also likes the sweet ones, with rice and red bean paste inside, while Wes never grew up with those and doesn't particularly enjoy them as an adult. My mom has successfully smuggled the red bean ones back to the United States a few times - she says that since there isn't meat inside it's okay...but really, how can you tell what's in it until you open it? She takes the risk anyway.
While neither Wes nor I grew up watching our mothers and aunts squatting around crafting these tamales, it's easy to romanticize the idea based on our parents' stories. How nice it must be, to gather around big bowls of ingredients and a stack of soaked leaves, filling and folding the afternoon away, chatting and bonding. My mom must have wanted to recreate that experience, so she actually brought back some of these leaves from Taiwan (legal, right?), and invited us kids over to try our hand at this age-old tradition. Boy, were we all in for a rude awakening. Wrapping your own zongzi is maybe one of our most confusing and excruciating kitchen experiments to date (making pizza dough is another one). Even my mom had no recollection of how to properly get them squared away, so rather than gathering around the ingredients, we found ourselves in a knot around the computer, watching blurry videos of old ladies deftly assembling them as if they were schoolboys folding paper airplanes. Practice makes almost-perfect though... after a few hapless incidents (like, exploding zongzi all over the floor), we were able to scrounge up a few that actually looked somewhat triangular. The most relieving part was that they all tasted exactly like zongzi. Thanks, Mom!! Now, I gotta write down the recipe before we all forget next year.
