Why do you eat mochi on the Chinese New Year's Day?

Traditional Chinese festivals are often inseparable from food. The people of Anqing are well aware of the deep relationship between festivals and food. For example, on the 15th day of the 7th month of the lunar calendar, which is the "half of the 7th month" and the "Ghost Festival" that the Anqing people pay attention to, the people of the ancestry of Mianyang and Tongcheng have been busy with the rice cake for the festival since a long time ago. The people of Anqing can be said to have a deep affection for the rice pudding. Under this deep attachment, there are many different kinds of rice pudding. On the half of the seventh month, the people of Firyang make the most famous dish, the vegetable heart poi. This kind of pure rice flour made by the shape of the buns of rice poi, filling a variety of delicious and delicious at the same time also contains a drive away the evil spirits and good luck, in memory of the ancestors in the beginning.

As early as the first week of the "half of July", relatives in the rural areas of Fengyang sent a large bag of rice flour to the home of the citizen Yin aunt. This rice flour and the market to see the glutinous rice flour is not the same, is selected this year's new harvest of early rice grinding out. This kind of rice flour is the best choice for making the "half of July" vegetable heart poi. "Nowadays, these rice flours are all ground by machines, but when we were small, we used to grind them by hand." Auntie Yin can't help but think back to the days when every family brought out rice to be washed and dried before every festival. Under the hot sun of early fall, the rice was quickly dried out, and the housewives carried pots of rice to be ground on small stone mills. After being finely ground by the stone mill and sifted through a fine sieve, the white, delicate rice flour is made.

On the fifteenth day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, early in the morning, Auntie Yin went to the market and bought fresh pork, tender bean curd, dried bean curd with five spices and so on, which are the necessary ingredients to make the stuffing, which the people of Firyang call "Ba Xin". When she got home, several of her sisters who live in the city came over. ?

"It's a custom in our family to make poi together on the half of July." Aunt Yin said, said together to do poi, one is more manpower to work, more importantly, take this opportunity, the old sisters get together.

Soon, everyone got busy according to the division of labor. The first thing you need to do is to make sure that you have a good understanding of what you're doing and how you're going to do it. For those who make the noodles, boil water in a pot, and when the water boils, pour in the rice noodles and knead them first. This is a very experienced and skillful job, the ratio of boiling water and flour should be just right, and out of the dough neither soft, nor hard. The process of kneading is a test of endurance, and you have to keep kneading hard until the dough is round and smooth, not sticky hands and not sticky pots and pans to be considered good.