Kevin’s mom has taken to spoiling us with meals in when she comes to visit, and it’s absolutely my favorite way to pass a few days when she’s in town. It’s a lot of fun to hang around the kitchen while she’s cooking, trying to absorb bits of cooking wisdom here and there while she casually whips up whole feasts before our eyes. Beyond just being a funny, self-assured woman, she’s also quick, with a razor-sharp mind and buckets of energy. I think of her almost as a force of nature. I often tell Kevin that the two of us together could not do what one of his mom is able to accomplish in an afternoon.
But even though she’s got incredible cooking talent and instincts, she’s not much of a teacher. On one of her visits she made something very special: tang yuan. It’s a filled mochi ball gently boiled in soup, and often served sweet, with red bean paste or sesame paste inside. Except Kevin’s mom made a savory tang yuan filled with pork and greens and mushrooms! Imagine a chewy, glutinous rice cake ball hiding inside a juicy bite of fluffy ground pork, Chinese herbs and mushrooms.
As she was making them we tried to get some lessons out of her but it was hopeless. She took a bag of glutinous rice flour and shook it out into a bowl, then boiled up some water. “How hot should the water be?” we asked. ”100 Chinese degrees, not American degrees!” She then poured the scalding water, volume unknown, into the bowl and first with chopsticks and then with her bare hands whipped the flour and water into a chalky paste, which became a smooth ball. The dough is finicky, too much or too little water and the dough becomes too sticky to handle. Too much pounding and it loses its elasticity. “What are you looking for?” I ventured when she was in the middle of a kneading session. “This!” she said, pointing to her handiwork. Then she cut me off because it was time to move on to the next step: filling the mochi and nestling morsels of meat inside the dough before sending them into a pot of boiling water.
I couldn’t tell you much more about how this goes. But oh my god they’re delicious.