Happy Lunar New Year! I hope you are having lots of dumplings (representing silver & gold ingots) during the next two weeks! We wish all of you an amazing Year of the Black Water Snake.

If you haven’t had enough celebrating, you’re in luck. Lantern Festival (a.k.a. Yuanxiao Festival) occurs on the 15th day of the lunar calendar, which is just around the corner. This year, it will be on February 24, 2013. Here’s a great tutorial I found for making paper lanterns! During the festival, you post riddles on your lanterns. When someone gets the answer right, you award them with a small prize. Make sure to get your ingredients for Tangyuan Soup, a warm dessert soup traditionally eaten during this festival. Here’s two very easy preparations that only take a few minutes to make.

lantern festival

There’s two main types of tangyuan (dumplings made of glutinous rice flour): the small (or mini) tangyuan pictured above and the large filled tangyuan pictured below. Both are sold frozen year-round at the Chinese supermarkets. The small ones, which are bouncy little balls, often come with a few pink ones — died with food coloring — that I usually discard, but I left them in for the pictures in this post. You can often fit 3 to 4 little minis in each spoonful and these are usually served in a soup that has egg drop. If you eat the larger ones in one big mouthful, you’ll notice that they tend to be slightly softer and a nice sweet filling will ooze out, and so the soup does not include egg drop. The most common fillings are sesame, peanut, and red bean paste. Some of these look purple because they are made with the black (looks like dark purple) glutinous rice.

Filled Tang Yuan 2

Filled Tangyuan Soup
~2 servings

  • 3 cups water
  • 6 filled frozen tangyuan
  • 1/4 cup fermented sweet rice
  • 1 tablespoon sugar + extra to taste

Instructions –

Bring water to a boil in a small pot. Add frozen tangyuan and bring back to a boil. Reduce the flame so that the water doesn’t boil over and cook until the tangyuan are floating, about two minutes. Stir in fermented sweet rice and bring back to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and stir in sugar. Add more sugar to taste. Serve immediately.

Sesame and Peanut filled Tang Yuan 2

Mini Tangyuan Soup
~8 servings

  • 6 cups water
  • 2 cups frozen mini tangyuan
  • rounded 1/2 cup fermented sweet rice
  • 2 tablespoons sugar + extra to taste
  • 1 egg, beaten

Instructions –

Bring water to a boil in a medium sized pot. Add mini tangyuan and bring back to a boil. Reduce the flame so that the water doesn’t boil over and cook until tangyuan are floating, about two minutes. Stir in fermented sweet rice and sugar, then bring back to a boil. Reduce flame so that water is simmering. Stir in egg a little bit at a time while constantly stirring. Add more sugar to taste and serve immediately.

Mini Tang Yuan and Fermented Sweet Rice Soup

posted by jessica at 01:03 PM Filed under Chinese, Desserts, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.