Chinese New Year - 2007 - The Year of the Boar

Our Spring Festival begin this week. My parents are preparing Chinese original food for it. People in different area of China have different foods for Spring Festival. In Hubei, the province with my city, one of the spring festival foods is made by lotus root and meat. At first, chop up meat as aspic but without tomato, and this kind of aspic isn't be cooked. Let's call it Chinese aspic.

Then clean the lotus root, choose the delicate part which is succulent and taste light sweet. (the lotus root can be eaten fresh.) The lotus root looks like several cannula which both ends are cuspate. And the cross section of the root is a rotundity with apertures, your finger can extend through these apertures.

The third step, Cut the lotus root to thin slice. Then put the aspic between two slices of lotus root, just like making a sandwich. Because of those apertures, you can see the meat in both sides.

The last step is deep fry them as both sides change to golden. When you taste them, you'll find the slices of lotus root are crisp, and the Chinese aspic in it is very delicious. This kind of food has a name called Lotus root's clamp, meaning the slices of lotus root clamp the Chinese aspic. In the phonetic transcriptions of Chinese characters, we call it OuJia. This is one of the many kinds of spring festival's food in Hubei Province. And all of the special food in Hubei is one of more kinds of Chinese original food.

Stephanie. Tianhui. Y., Wuhan GuNan School, Wuhan, China