Related to celebrating my birthday, I thought it would be fun to do a couple of new things. One, make glutinous rice ball soup (aka Tang Yuan) and two, attend a local Lantern Festival celebration.
Ever since I saw the rice ball soup recipe in the game (which is easily my favorite to cook up since I purchased it last year during the Lantern Festival random trivia event), I’ve wondered what the dish actually tastes like. On the surface, the list of ingredients just didn’t sound appetizing to me. Even more so after I read this recipe. But my ambition to recreate and try the recipes in LOP over road my initial reaction.
Boy am I glad I did. Not only did it taste far better than I ever expected, it was super fun to make. If only my eldest was not distracted with other things, he would’ve loved rolling up the rice balls with me!
The only draw back to my experience was that I was unable to find pandan leaves. I ended up using vanilla bean pods as a substitute in the sweet ginger syrup.
I think it worked very well, but I would love to make it again with the leaves, just to see how it varies from vanilla in the syrup. And having never used bruised ginger before in anything, I’ve decided I may have to do more things with it. 😂 I love using fresh ginger whenever it’s called for in a recipe. But there was something really nice about the subtleness of ginger in the syrup that made me want to try it out in more recipes going forward.
Moving on to the Lantern Festival. For the sake of my children, I arrived at the tail end of the indoor activities, so we could all participate in the mini festival outside. Something I’ll try not to do again in the future. I feel like I personally missed out on a lot of neat performances that I and my husband would’ve enjoyed. But you know, kids kind of take a precedent. Anyway, due to my late arrival the only souvenir I was able to acquire was this piece calligraphy.
Given everything going on in the world right now, and particularly in Ukraine, I thought “peace” was a very appropriate symbol to request.
And this was the last green lantern I acquired for my eldest at the decorating station, aaaaand he didn’t feel like coloring. He was a little distracted by the Lion Dance. And I don’t blame him, I was too! 😆