How to make Chinese mugwort rice cake

To flavor the rice cake, Chinese mugwort (Artemisia argyi) is used:



The mugwort leaves should be cleaned...



...and then boiled:



Wringing the boiled leaves will then remove the bitter sap contained within the plant.

Lye water must now be prepared. Lye water is important for three reasons: 1) to partially digest the mugwort leaves to make them easier to knead into the dough; 2) to serve as a preservative; 3) to act as a flavoring agent. In Fuzhou, soybean ash is preferentially used, but since this is generally in short supply, rice stalk ash is often used instead. Large piles of rice stalk are burned after the harvest and the resulting ash is stored primarily for use as fertilizer, but also for making both rice cake and zongzi later on in the year. Boiled water is poured over the ash and the lixivium is filtered through a cheesecloth. Incidentally, if you are not making rice cakes (or zongzi), the resulting brown alkaline liquid (lye water) can also be diluted with water and used as shampoo:





Note that lye water should NOT be consumed directly (it may burn a hole in your throat or stomach).

The mugwort leaves are now boiled in lye water until very soft and until most of the water has boiled away:



After the mugwort leaves are removed from the fire, sugar can be added to taste, and the mixture is poured into a 1:1 blend of rice flour and sticky rice flour (if you want softer and chewier rice cakes, you can increase the amount of sticky rice flour):



Everything should then be kneaded into a homogeneous green dough:



The green dough can then be fashioned into cakes...



and steamed in a cauldron:





After about 30 minutes, the resulting cakes will have become dark green in color and are ready to be eaten:

Swallows in the house

In Fuzhou, it is considered very good luck to have swallows living in one's house. If the swallows voluntarily choose to build a nest in your house, then your house must be pretty amazing! People put nails into one of the roof beams of the central halls of their houses in order to encourage the swallows to build their mud nests right there. When swallow guano accumulates beneath the nest, this is never cleaned or swept away: it serves as the best evidence that you have swallows happily living in your home. Here are a couple of pictures of swallows in the house (including a parent swallow feeding its babies):

Farming in Fuzhou

While in Fuzhou, I got to engage in a number of agricultural pursuits. On the very first day, we went into the mountains to forage for Chinese bayberries (Myrica rubra). Wild bayberries are tangy, unlike the bland bayberries available in the rural markets. They are usually picked from the ground beneath a bayberry tree (which can be manually shaken in order to make more bayberries fall). When going into the mountains, we avoided the commonly used trails because we figured all the bayberries would have already been taken. Gina's dad went in front, machete in hand:





On another day, I got to make Chinese mugwort-flavored green sticky rice cakes (detailed instructions on how to make these will be provided in a future post):



I also got to feed the fish (with grass cut along the river):



And, last but not least, I got to transplant rice with the village women (men don't usually do this kind of work...I think they prefer to stay home and play mahjong):





Finally, here's a random picture of a ham hanging out to dry after being washed (hams usually accumulate so much grease over the year from hanging over the stove that they occasionally need to be washed)...



and of Gina eating a cucumber:

The Founding of Fuzhou

Our next stop after Dongguan was Fuzhou, the hamlet where Gina grew up. (Fuzhou is located in Pengfang Township, in case there is any confusion here.) Here is a picture of Fuzhou from the main road, looking across the rice fields:



For those who have had the pleasure of visiting, you might be interested in knowing when Fuzhou was founded. Two years ago, Gina and I encountered the following tombstone on a hill behind the village:



The stone which actually dates to 1736 is to commemorate a certain Liu Enrong who died sometime in the Ming. The question is who was Liu Enrong. While in Fuzhou last week, I got my hands on a manuscript copy of the clan genealogy (which had been burned during the Cultural Revolution, along with all other burnable material stored in the clan ancestral hall). This particular manuscript was copied (onto an old newspaper) in 1978 (presumably from another copy that had survived the destruction):



This genealogy clarifies who Liu Enrong was. He was none other than the founder of Fuzhou hamlet, arriving in Fuzhou in the eighth month of the year 1504. According to the genealogy, he is the 13th-generation ancestor of Gina's dad's adoptive grandfather (while still very young, Gina's dad was purchased by the Liu family from an avid gambler surnamed Peng).

Shanghai & Guangdong

Here is a quick summary of the first week or so of our stay in China. We first spent a couple of days in Shanghai. I bought some books, we delivered some tuxedo vest samples to a business associate of my friend's aunt, and we had excellent Shanghainese food in the company of Beijing (in this case, a person, not to be confused with the city), Gina's friend from Knoxville:



We then flew to Guangzhou and spent a night there in order to have the time to see a few of Gina's old friends from her time working in the textile factory:



Gina also got a fashionable new Japanese-style haircut:



The next day we went by bus to Dongguan (about an hour away) to see the family (Gina's three older sisters). Here are some photos (first one taken at Second Sister's factory and the second one taken at Starbucks):





Finally, before leaving Guangdong for Jiangxi Province, I had the immense pleasure of eating durian on two occasions, including this one:



Besides eating durian, the other mission I was on while in Guangdong was to drink plenty of Hong Kong style milk tea. Unfortunately, I failed on this mission because none of the family/friends like Cantonese food, so we never went to the right restaurants (plus, it seems that Hong Kong style milk tea is far more popular in Hong Kong than across the border).

On June 4, we took an overnight train from Dongguan to Ji'an (arriving around 5 am) to spend 8 days with Gina's parents. I'll write more on this later...