Winter Solstice to Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve is here. Christmas is just hours away. I have so many pictures of food and restaurants pilling up but I don't seem to have the time to actually start writing and uploading them. Just bear with me and once I finish my thesis and finals, guess I'll be doing all that in one shot. Winter Solstice has come and passed and I din really feel it that much...it used to be a very exciting day or rather, a nite before my mum, sis and I would start rolling up the 'tangyuan' or glutinous rice balls and keep them in the fridge. The next day, we'll all boil them together like a mother-daughters project in the sweet sugary soup. Even though I have never liked glutinous rice balls, the process of doing them were so much fun that I'll even reluctantly eat up a bowl when my mum made me. Those days were over now since my sis and I are so far apart and mum's no longer here. :(
 

Taken from googling and the owner's site is depicted

The Tang Yuan we used to make never really had a real recipe...which is prolly why it's more fun...
We just gauged about half a pack of the glutinous rice flour, so prolly around 150g? or 200g? and made a hole in the middle and started pouring bit by bit the water and start kneading till it form a soft dough...adding in 2-3 tbs of fine sugar as we go along. We then divide them into three: 1) White (current ones) 2) Pink 3) Green

The pink ones are done by adding 2-3 drops of red colouring or more if we want them brighter

The green ones are done by adding blended juice of pandan leaves


Once that's done, we roll them up and if we're leaving them overnight, we put them in a covered container or tray with a wet cloth over it...
Cooking Procedure:
Big pot of hot boiling water
1) drop in each balls once by one and once they float, transfer them to a bowl of cold water

Second pot of hot boiling water
1) add screwpine leaves/pandan and sugar (as sweet as you want) and drop those cooked tangyuan inside..

Easy-peasy. The reason I chose the pic above is probably cos ours usually look like that. But our white ones are usually bigger and there's 12 or 13 of them...haha...the rest are all smaller ones..

Oh how I missed those days...

Thanks to UTM's new academic calendar, I couldn't even go back home for Christmas and is stuck in the uni the whole of December. Oh well, at least there's CNY hols to look forward to. Maybe I'll just spend my Xmas Day in some Cyber Cafe to pass time or do some drawings. Today is not a very good day...a lil pissed at what I thought as privacy violation but will try my very best to forget about it. Sometimes I wonder, how could people whom you thought know you, don't really do. And those whom you thought do not know you well, seemed to know you better?