Today is the 8th day of the 12th moon month (also called „La“) – so like Dec 8th of the moon calendar. In Chinese „Ba“ means 8 and „Jie“ means festival. So today is Dec 12th festival. And what would you eat on such a day? Of course La Ba Zhou which is Dec 12th porridge. I would not have known what to put inside. But Master Liu went out and bought each of the ingredients separately and mixed a bag for me and one bag for Dupree to take home and cook. This is my bag of ingredients:
I do not know the names of all the different kind of beans that exist in China but I spotted at least 5 different kinds in this bag.It was the first time for me to cook this kind fo zhou and it seemed to take forever (more than 1 hour) for the beans to get soft. I added raisins and some sugar and then celebrated this late and exhausted.
P.S.: After I made this blog entry my mother sent me the following picture of the ingredients she uses for an Italian dish. And that looks amazingly similar to the Chinese La Ba Zhou. How interesting 🙂
