Laba porridge: The traditional practice of Laba porridge is to select and wash Coicis Semen, white beans, red beans and mung beans. Boil it until it is half cooked, then put it in rice, millet and yellow rice, then cook it with slow fire to make the porridge thick and moderate, add sugar when eating, and mix it with pre-cooked red dates and chestnuts. There are so many items on the market today that it is not difficult to find all these materials, but how many people will understand and have the patience to follow these traditional practices to cook porridge? It's hard to remember that it was Laba, and I bought a bag of porridge and cooked it in a pressure cooker.

Generally, it consists of peanuts, dates, almonds, walnuts, chestnuts, lotus seeds, lilies, longan pulp, raisins and various kinds of rice and beans.

Tianjin people cook Laba porridge, which is similar to Beijing's, including lotus seeds, lilies, pearl rice, Italian glutinous rice, barley kernels, sticky glutinous rice, sticky yellow rice, beans, mung beans, longan meat, ginkgo, red dates, sweet-scented osmanthus in syrup and so on. They are all good in color, smell and taste. In recent years, black rice has been added. The Laba porridge can be used for dietotherapy, and has the effects of invigorating spleen, stimulating appetite, invigorating qi, calming nerves, clearing away heart fire and nourishing blood.

Laba porridge in Shanxi, also known as eight-treasure porridge, is mainly millet, with cowpea, adzuki bean, mung bean, jujube, sticky yellow rice, rice and glutinous rice. In southeastern Shanxi, cooking porridge with water is also one of the eating customs. This kind of porridge is called fragrant rice, which means adzuki beans, red beans, cowpeas, sweet potatoes, peanuts, glutinous rice and persimmons on the fifth day of the twelfth lunar month.

On the day of Laba in the northern Shaanxi Plateau, besides all kinds of rice and beans, porridge is cooked with all kinds of dried fruits, tofu and meat. Usually cooked in the morning, sweet and salty, depending on people's tastes. If it is lunch, we should cook some noodles in porridge and have a reunion dinner. After eating, you should put porridge on the door, on the stove and on the trees outside the door to ward off evil spirits and avoid disasters, so as to welcome the next year's agricultural harvest. According to folklore, it is forbidden to eat vegetables on Laba, saying that there are many weeds in the field after eating Lai crops. Laba people in southern Shaanxi want to eat mixed porridge, which is divided into "five flavors" and "eight flavors" The former is cooked with rice, glutinous rice, peanuts, ginkgo and beans. The latter uses the above five raw materials to add diced meat, tofu, radish and seasonings. On Laba Festival, people not only eat Laba porridge, but also worship their ancestors and granaries with porridge.

Gansu people have traditionally cooked Laba porridge with whole grains and vegetables. After cooking, it is not only for family members to eat, but also distributed to neighbors to feed livestock. In Lanzhou and Baiyin urban areas, Laba porridge is made of rice, beans, red dates, ginkgo, lotus seeds, raisins, dried apricots, dried wax gourd, walnuts, shredded mung beans, sugar and diced meat. After cooking, it is first used to worship the door god, the kitchen god, the land god and the god of wealth, and pray for good weather and good harvests in the coming year; Then give it to the neighbors and give it to the last family. Wuwei, Gansu pays attention to "Sulaba", eating coarse rice, lentil rice or coarse rice, cooked with fried seeds and twist. Folk call it "bean porridge bubble".

People in Ningxia usually cook porridge with lentils, soybeans, adzuki beans, broad beans, black beans, rice and potatoes as laba rice, and then add wheat flour or buckwheat flour to cut into rhombic "ears" of willow leaves, or make it into "sparrow heads" of small round eggs, and then add chopped green onion oil to cook porridge. On this day, the whole family only eats laba rice, not vegetables.

Most people in Xining, Qinghai are Han people, but Laba doesn't eat porridge, but eats wheat kernel rice. Boil freshly ground wheat with beef and mutton, add green salt, ginger peel, pepper, tsaoko, Miao Xiang and other condiments, and after a night of slow fire, the meat and wheat merge into a milky white shape. Boil the pot in the morning, and the smell is fragrant.

In the "Confucius Food System" in Shandong Province, there are two kinds of "Laba porridge". One is made of rice kernels, longan, lotus seeds, lilies, chestnuts, red dates, japonica rice, etc. There are also some "porridge fruits" added to the bowl, mainly because the fruits are carved into various shapes for ornament. This kind of porridge is specially for Confucius' master and the master of the zodiac. The other is cooked with rice, sliced meat, cabbage and tofu. , is for the servants in Confucius.

People in Henan eat laba rice, which is made of eight kinds of raw materials, such as millet, mung bean, cowpea, wheat kernel, peanut, red dates and corn. When cooking, add some brown sugar and walnuts to make the porridge thick and fragrant, which means a bumper harvest in the coming year.

Eating Laba porridge in Jiangsu is divided into sweet and salty, and the cooking method is the same. It's just that salty porridge is served with vegetables and oil. Suzhou people cook Laba porridge with arrowheads, water chestnuts, walnuts, pine nuts, euryales, red dates, chestnuts, fungus, vegetables, Flammulina velutipes and so on. Li Fu, a scholar in Suzhou in the Qing Dynasty, once wrote a poem: "The porridge on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month came from Brahma, and the seven treasures blended beautifully with mixed flavors."

Zhejiang people usually cook Laba porridge with walnut kernel, pine nuts, Gordon Euryale seeds, lotus seeds, red dates, longan meat and litchi meat. Sweet and delicious, pray for a long life. It is said that this method of cooking porridge came from Nanjing, which contains some legends.

There are many people in Sichuan. Laba porridge is made in a variety of ways, including sweet, salty and spicy. Rural people eat salty porridge, mainly soybeans, peanuts, diced meat, white radish and carrots. Strangers come here to taste, although do as the Romans do, but it is difficult to get used to it. Nowadays, many people in the city eat sweet porridge, which can be called unique flavor. Laba is closely related to porridge. Drinking porridge in Laba is also a fancy and a level.

===============================

Making laba porridge:

(1) Rice (glutinous rice is better, and it is better to add some purple rice or black rice), mung beans and red beans, wash them, add water and cook them over high fire. First, bring it to a boil and heat it for 5 minutes.

Change the clock to a small fire.

(2) Red dates, longan, tremella, chestnuts (eaten raw, the rest can be fried with sugar and shelled), walnuts, medlar, raisins, ginkgo (ginkgo), lotus seeds, hawthorn, kumquat, plums (seedless plums, preserved apricots and various preserved fruits, etc.). ), peanuts, sesame seeds and kidney beans (washed and pickled)

(3) It takes about 1-2 hours. (The longer the better)

Key points:

I can teach you a trick to make porridge very greasy and be lazy. This is to buy something called sago (which can be bought in the supermarket, in fact, it is a special kind of small starch granules), and put some sago down for about half an hour to make the porridge more paste and sweeter. Other small materials can be added or subtracted due to conditions, and it doesn't matter who is more or less.

PS: Shrimp and onion can be prepared by Jiang Ye.

It is definitely good for the stomach, and some people say that this porridge is longevity porridge. It is said that drinking more is better than tonic.