My most messy Winter Solstice celebration

Each year, December 22 is always a fixed date for Chinese to celebrate the Winter Solstice Day, a.k.a. "Kor Tung Jit". This year, I have my lil iron chef to help me out. The moment I told her that we are going to "chai min fan", means to "play" with the dough, her eyes grew so big and nodded non stop! With her presence, I knew that I've got to do some clean up later. But I was so wrong. It was a BIG clean up for me, because she mashed the dough into tiny little pieces and happily sprinkled them on the floor. I have no time to snap the disastrous condition as I need to rush and prepare for the first batch of tong yuen for my neighbour cum colleague, an Indian family who just stay few houses away only. He told me that before he moved to this taman, his neighbour used to share the tong yuen with his family. Ok, since the left and right of his house is also Indian family, I've decided to deliver my home made tong yuen for him.

Little iron chef was so happy and followed my instruction to pose for my camera with the small bag of colorful dough. My mom bought this ready made rice flour dough from the morning market.

We all thought that we have a big piece of gula melaka or brown candy (or "phin thong", just get to learn this term from Chinnee!) in the fridge...after searching high and low, bayang pun tak nampak! Knowing that the Chinese medicine hall already closed by noon, my only choice was to head on to the nearest Indian kedai runcit and get a piece of gula melaka. As for the ginger, we don't have any in the fridge either!! OMG, this year is the most unprepared year for the making of tong yuen. My mom was so selamba when I told her that I can't find the ginger. She said "go outside and 'harvest' the ginger from the flower pot lah...organic ginger tau!". Waseh....I didn't realized the existence of the ginger plant at home!

So my sister went to dig it out gently. The moment it was uprooted from the soil, we immediately smelled the ginger! Initially, I thought that it might be a very small and lousy ginger plant. But hey! This home grown organic ginger was superb lah!

See....that is my mom's very first organic ginger :) Smells good. Taste good.

By the time I was done snapping the above pictures, the camera's battery died. Grrrrrr....so not able to share the picture of my Ugly Betty Tong Yuen over here :P