The Dragon Boat Festival

Today is the Dragon Boat Festival. People eat zh ongzi and eggs on this day and wear five- color bracelets. We need to take the bracelets off and when the first rain comes after the festival, we need to throw them into the rain. The bracelets will suck all the bad luck and when we throw them away, that means we are getting rid of all the bad luck. The thing on Kevin's wrist is the five- color bracelet, it's called " Wu Cai Xian" in Chinese.
Here's the story of zhongzi. It's from one of the Joy books.
A long time ago in Chu Destiny, a poet, Chu Yuan, drowned in a river. He loved his country very much and often gave the king advice, but the king never listened to him. On May 5th on the lunar calendar, he jumped into a river and never came up. People didn't want the fish to eat his body, so they made zhongzi and threw them into the river to feed the fish. Now people in South China get in dragon boats and race to a flag in the water. The first boat to get the flag wins the race. But in Beijing, people race the boats to a duck in the water.One person from each boat jumps into the water to catch the duck. Then everyone will clap and they will cook the famous" Peking Duck".
I'm not sure why people eat eggs as well. Might because zhongzi can't make you full. Haha.
Here's the recipe of making zhongzi. To make 50 zhongzi, you need:
a. bamboo leaves b. straw c. 5kg sticky rice d. 1.5 kg peanuts
e. soy sauce f. pepper g. salt
Stuffing: a. 1.5 kg pork b. dried black mushrooms c. bulk onions
d. dried shrimp e . 25 salty egg yolks
1. Soak bamboo leaves and peanuts in different bowls of water for one day.
2. Soak the rice for 4 hours.
3. Fry the rice with the peanuts, add some soy sauce and pepper, and fry for 10 minutes.
4. Fry pork for a few minutes. Add dried black mushrooms, bulk onions, dried shrimp, salt and soy sauce and fry for 5 minutes.
5. Take two bamboo leaves and fold into a cone.
6. Put a spoonful of rice into the cone.
7. Put in some stuffing, and then two spoonfuls of rice to cover the stuffing. Press it tight.
8. Fold the bamboo leaves over the top to close the zhongzi.
9. Wrap the zhongzi tightly with some straw.
10. Steam it for one and a half hours.
You can see the picture up there. Well, that's the way to make standard zhongzi in Taiwan. Now, in North China, we have maybe hundreds of different flavors of zhongzi, salty, sweet, spicy, meat, fruit, vegetables....I'm not a big fun of zhongzi but I think it's fun to collect different flavors of it. Kevin doesn't like zhongzi either so we only ate one each today. It's a good festival to us because we got free zhongzi, eggs and fruit from some of the parents from my classes. Yeah!
Happy Dragon Boat Festival to people all over the world! Especially to the Chinese people who are not together with their family.