The sticky rice cake for the Lunar New Year/Carlos Pueblo

 The sticky rice cake for the Lunar New Year/Carlos Pueblo

My tennis partner Tony has given me sticky rice cakes twice for the Chinese Lunar New Year. It has brought me back some fond memories for my childhood in Taiwan. We. Taiwanese, have been under heavy influence by Chinese way of living for a long time. It has been categorized as a Sinicized race of Taiwanese. We celebrate the Chinese Lunar new Year and we eat like Chinese. The sticky rice cake is one of the items on the table during the Lunar new Year. I was the one to help my mother to make such foods as in my recollection.

I was not the type of kids to stay home most of the time. I went out and played; therefore, I got to know some other stuff other than books from schools. I carried a small bag of sweet rice to a soybean cake shop, bean curd, for grinding with a motor other than an old stone grinder before that time in history. The first product was a rice bag of sweet rice water mixture which I took it home to squeeze out the water overnight with a big piece of stone. My mother would take the solid part of the grinded rice wet powder mix with sugar in water and steam it for hours to make the sticky rice cake. We worship our many gods and Buddhas this way with many dishes first and eat them afterward. As I remember that the sticky rice cake is not that easy for my mother to make. After I went to the senior high school, she traded sugar with merchants for the sticky rice cake and still made the salty cake, white radish cake, and plain sticky balls, etc. 

I didn't like the sticky rice cake when I was a kid and I preferred meats. It was a time we didn't have enough proteins. Later, I learned the fried sticky rice like Japanese Tambula with egg flour coating and I liked it. After years in the U.S. with plenty of meat consumption, I kind like the sticky cake once in a while. 

Tony's wife is very considerate when she prepares the sticky rice cake. She uses minimum sugar for both Tony and me due to our diabetes. I understand my mother's problem because she attempt to make the cake thicker like the commercial products yet in the U.S. the cakes are usually half size of the thickness in compare with the old time Taiwanese. The steam can penetrate more easily in the modern heat pot. My mother would loose her temper and blame her incoming year with such a bad luck with the failure of the sticky rice cake making.