Week 16 - Hunan/Xiang

The theme for Week 16 was Hunan/Xiang, so no surprise, this challenge entry is also doubling as one for the AtWCC for China. This was a hard week for me to pick a dish. Hunan food is known for being spicy - very spicy - and very spicy is not something you can really do with a young toddler. On top of that, there is a particular spice or chili pepper that gives A a bad stomachache, and we haven't yet identified which that is, so another reason to avoid the spice! Thankfully, there were a few non-spicy Hunan dishes to pick from, but really not as many as I was hoping to choose from.

I ended up making pearl meatballs with sticky rice from The Woks of Life, mostly sticking with the recipe but with some modifications like using ground pork instead of hand-chopping it, and leaving out the water chestnuts (because we couldn't find any in the store, even though we think these would have tasted great in it). The ingredients we used were:

- 3/4 cup short grain sweet rice

- 1 lb ground pork

- about 2 tsp minced ginger

- 1 bunch of scallions

- 3 tbsp cold water

- 2 tbsp Shaoxing wine

- 2 tsp cornstarch

- ground white pepper

- 1 tbsp sesame oil

- sea salt

- 1/2 tsp sugar

On the side, we had some baby bok choy and oyster mushroom caps, as well as rice, for a nice, balanced meal. Really wish we could have found those water chestnuts in time though!

I followed the recipe fairly closely for how to make these, because I'd never made anything like them before, and I was very concerned that the rice was still going to be hard and crunchy after steaming. The basic steps were to soak the glutinous rice for a few hours, combine the meatball ingredients, refrigerate the meat mixture, and then after the chilling step, form the meatballs and roll them in the rice. Then they steamed for about 20 minutes. Unlike the original recipe, we used a stainless steel steamer instead of a bamboo steamer, but that seemed to work fine.

The meatballs were really good! The rice was soft and not the least bit crunchy. I did make the meatballs a little too big and would adjust that next time, but they were really flavorful and the rice was an interesting addition that worked. I would definitely make these again.