La Ba Jie - La Ba Festival Today (22 Jan 2009) « My Shanghai That’s Shanghai

La Ba Jie - La Ba Festival Today (22 Jan 2009)

I didn’t know today (22 Jan 2010) is La Ba Jie until I watched the morning news.

La Bameans the eighth day of the 12thmonth in Chinese Lunar Calendar. The whole month is regarded as the coldest time in the year and in Chinese we put La in front of some other word to indicate this special time, for example La Yue is putting La in front of the Yue (month) means the coldest month.

I don’t really know the history of La Ba Jie (I googled a bit. La Ba Jie is usually for wishing a harvest new year). But I do know the must-eat food for La Ba Jie is La Ba Zhou(La Ba Congee). Google also reminded us!

Google's home page for La Ba Jie

As the name indicated (Ba in Chinese means eight), we usually put 8 different ingredients in the congee.

Normally they can be all sorts of beans (red bean, kidney bean, black been etc), different types of rice (brown rice, glutinous rice, black rice etc), multi grains, dried fruits (raisins, Chinese dates etc).

Usually La Ba Zhou is sweet but in some parts of China, people do cook savoury version by putting some bacon, salted meat or fish.

All the ingredients of my La Ba Zhou (La Ba Congee)

So in my opinion, this is the most healthy traditional Chinese food because so many good things in one bowl. And I would recommend it as the best comfort food in the cold winter.

The ingredients are so easy to get because you have so many choices, just mix and match. I cook it all the time.

First, because all the ingredients are dehydrated, we usually need to leave the beans, rices to soak over night.

Dried ingredients of La Ba Zhou

This is what they look like after soaked overnight. You can see everything becomes bigger and plumped. So bear in mind, don’t prepare too much of everything because everything becomes bigger after soaked.

All the La Ba Zhou ingredients after soaked

Then put the ingredients in order into a big pot. Put the ingredients which are hard and take longer time to cook first such as beans.

Usually my order would be:

Beans - rice/grain - fruits

You will need a lot of water to cook all the ingredients, usually 5:1 (water:ingredients), otherwise you will get rice instead of congee.

Cook all the ingredients on the medium heat till everything is softened. You can put some sugar to give it more taste. But I prefer not because the congee itself has its natural sweetness from all the ingredients.