What’s another year (2)…

My! My! How time flies…and in just a blink of an eye, another year has passed. This coming Thursday – the 5th Day of the 5th Month in the Chinese Lunar Calendar, the Chinese community will be celebrating Duanwu Jie or the Dragon Boat Festival. If you do not know the history or background behind this festival, you can always go and google it up yourself as I am not going to delve into that.

In conjunction with this festival, everyone will be making and eating chang or those triangular-shaped rice dumplings. Here in Sibu, we can only buy the Hokkien chang which is darker and contains pork belly and maybe, shitake mushroom as well, cooked in soy sauce. My mother-in-law used to make this kind of chang but it does not look like she will be making any this year. Anyway, there isn’t much of a problem getting these and my favourite would be the ones sold at the Kim Tak Mini Supermarket just round the corner from my house at only RM1.80 each…

These are darker in colour than the nyonya chang that I will feature later in the post…

…and being made for sale commercially, do not expect too much meat inside. In fact, it seems that they use minced meat these days instead of the usual pork belly slices that one could find in the past…

…and even that, they only give you a little bit. Well, what can we expect – considering that the prices of everything have been going up?

You can buy bigger ones with a salted egg yolk inside at RM3.00 each which are also quite nice, and these days, they also have the pillow chang which I think, comes from the Cantonese community but some other dialects also claim it to be theirs. These are quite big and sold at RM5.00 each. To me, it is something like the dimsum delicacy – Lo Mai Kai wrapped in lotus leaves.

We can’t buy my favourite – the nyonya chang here in Sibu, only in Kuching. They usually wrap these using pandan (screwpine) leaves instead of the traditional bamboo leaves and inside, there is minced meat with shitake mushrooms fried with soy sauce and pounded ketumbar (coriander seeds, a kind of spice) which gives it that unique flavour that I particularly love. I was told that if you use pandan leaves, the chang may go bad quite fast, so my friend and ex-colleague, Richard, would put a piece of bamboo leaf inside and wrap the whole thing up using pandan leaves for its additional fragrance.

I remember this time last year, I was lamenting in my post over the fact that I would not be able to enjoy any of these nyonya changs when out of the blue, Richard posted a comment in the post saying that he would be sending some over to my house. Praise the Lord, my prayers were answered! LOL!!!

Needless to say, I was so delighted when I received a message from him on my wall in Facebook the other day, saying that he had not forgotten me this year and would be delivering some to my doorstep and that was exactly what he did yesterday evening…

I don’t know how many there were exactly but I think there were no less than half a dozen or more. I did not count as I just could not wait to sample one of them despite the fact that I had just had my dinner before he arrived. As you can see, they are whiter than the Hokkien ones…

…and being homemade for own consumption, he was more generous with the meat filling. It seems that he is not using pandan leaves this year, being harder and more difficult to wrap, but I gather that alternatively, he puts some in the water when boiling the dumplings instead.

Just one bite into it and I felt like I was being transported out of this world! If anyone had told me at that point in time that Heaven was a place on earth, I would have just quietly nodded in agreement. It simply took my breath away and left me quite speechless…

Thanks so much, Richard, for the dumplings and thanks a zillion for remembering me again this year. For those in the know, he is the nephew of a family friend whom we would respectfully call Ah Hiok Ee (Auntie Ah Hiok) in her presence if we knew what was good for us. LOL!!! She was renowned for her cooking and baking, and it certainly looks like this nephew of hers has inherited her culinary skills from her.

Perhaps around this time next year, Richard, you can start taking orders? I would want at least 20…or 30, if you can manage that many! Hahahahaha!!!