Chang Festival

The annual 'Chang' (rice dumpling) festival is to commemorate the ancient Chinese poet Qu Yuan who drowned himself in a river to prove his innocence when he was wrongly accused for something- I forgot what. Either that or he committed suicide because he didn't want to bow to government evil forces. I can't really remember for what reason exactly, but anyway he jumped into a river for the higher good. So on the fifth day of fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar for every year since that fateful day hundreds of years ago, the peasant folk would make 'chang' and throw it into rivers in hope that the fish would eat the 'chang' and not nibble at the poet's body.


This year I made 'chang' for the first time. Since I said making 'chang' was very easy, cheh what's so difficult, my mom decided to see how good I am. And as social etiquette dictates, every year my mom would make more 'chang' to give to other people than for ourselves and in the process tire herself out thoroughly. This year a total of 80 'chang' will have to be made, so it's only proper that I help.

Firstly, the ingredients.

Glutinous rice with bean~



Belly pork (or five flower meat) seasoned and stirfried with garlic


Mushrooms!


Chestnuts. look closely, they look eerily like brains. got right and left hemispheres, and also markings that resemble brain foldings, err I forgot what it's called already. can anyone tell me??


Dried shrimp (hae bi)

And my favourite! salted duck egg yolks. Don't they look cute??


My mom decided I would make those for our own consumption, and she would made those to be given away. Biasa la.
Since I love kiam ak nui (salted duck egg), of course I choose the biggest and nicest and most orangey ones to make my chang. Same with mushrooms. =P And since my dad likes dried shrimp, I put more in also. And I also choose bigger pieces of meat. To fit everything extra in, I make BIG chang. muahahaha.
While I was wrapping, I had nothing better to do so I thought I would come up with a bak chang chant, like the Big Mac chant.
It goes like that:

One piece of fat belly meat,
juicy mushroom,
crunchy chestnut,
shiny egg yolk,
and..
a sprinkling of dried shrimp
in a glutinous rice dumpling!

See if u can do it in under 4 seconds, I give u a free bak chang.

After that I came up with a brilliant idea of having something like a lucky draw. Each chang would have different ingredients, some would have extra egg yolk! while others would have 2 pieces of meat and nothing else! muahahaha. Fun eh? But no one approved of it.

My bak chang. Not bad eh?


The bak changs. Cute le.


My mom at work.

I look like a gawky schoolgirl. yea I cut my hair.
Altogether I made 3 bunches, about 30 chang. My mom still made more la, heh..
One of my chang opened up when boiled, but except for that 1 failure all turned out very well and actually quite pretty (heh perasan) and most importantly got a lot of 'liao' (filling)! XOXOXO
I conclude that making chang is easy but hard work.

The chang have to be boiled for 3-4 hours.
This is the primitive charcoal stove used. Sorry please tilt your head 90 degrees to the left. tq.


Men of the family dealing with the boiling process. eeww look at the water after boiling the chang.




The region just slightly below my waist (it's the lumbar I think) hurts from standing too long. Pain lo. =(
And the arch of my foot hurts too.
And my thigh muscles hurt.
My mom didn't suffer any pain though. What's the matter with me?

Now that I'm actually eating the chang I made, I can't bring myself to eat it. It took so much effort to wrap..