Glutinous rice dumplings are possibly one of my favorite foods, after ribs and sweets. I usually don’t like rice products, like rice crackers, mochi, congee, or just plain rice, but for some reason I’m a big fan of these dumplings. I love the light flavor of the lotus leaves, and I’ve found out that reheating dumplings by steaming instead of re-boiling gives them much more flavor – probably because the flavor stays on the rice instead of being boiled into the water.

I’ve been wanting to make my own glutinous rice dumplings, but I never had the chance to do it because I never knew the Asian grocery stores around the street carried bamboo leaves! Anyhow, these are supposedly Hakka-style ‘chung’s, but I find they taste way too much of Chinese five-spice powder (is that normal?), so I won’t post the recipe up. I also boiled them for two hours (most recipes call for 1 1/2 hours to 2 hours, but another recipe says 2 to 2 1/2 hours, so I chose 2), and the green beans turned to mush! Aaaw! >.< Oh well, next time I’ll know – and when I figure out a decent recipe, I’ll post it up :D