Qingjian Chive Boxes

Qingjian Chive Boxes

　　Qingjian Chive Boxes

　　In March, around the Qingming Festival, the earth revives and everything is renewed. At this time, the people of Yulin, who have gone without fresh vegetables since early winter the previous year, finally welcome a bright and vibrant spring. And the first fresh vegetable they taste in spring is chives.

　　Chives are delicious—they have tender leaves, a bright color, and a strong flavor. They can be mixed with noodles, used in dumplings, or stir-fried with eggs. But the best way to eat chives is still in chive boxes.

　　Making chive boxes isn’t just about wrapping chives. Besides flour, pork, and cellophane noodles, you also need some seasonings. First, stew the pork and boil the cellophane noodles until soft. Then, chop the stewed pork, soft noodles, and chopped chives into a coarse mixture using a sharp knife. Mix this with various seasonings, then scoop a spoonful of the mixture and wrap it between two round dough pieces—one on top and one on the bottom—to form a chive box. However, at this stage, the chive box is still raw and needs to be either fried or pan-fried before eating.

　　There’s not much fuss in frying or pan-frying chive boxes. For frying, you can use either lard or vegetable oil. But frying chive boxes is different from frying fried glutinous rice cakes. When making fried glutinous rice cakes, you pour in half a pot of oil, but since chive boxes are fried one at a time, you only need a small spoonful of oil per box—one scoop of oil for each chive box. For pan-frying, no oil is needed; just place the wrapped chive boxes in the pan, similar to making flatbread. Just flip them frequently and cook them evenly for good results. As for whether fried or pan-fried chive boxes are better, that’s not easy to generalize. Fried ones are crispier, while pan-fried ones are softer—the difference isn’t huge. Anyway, as long as it’s a chive box, it’s delicious. The people of Yulin are naturally bold and aren’t too fussy about details. What matters to them is that when the new chives come in March, they must eat at least one or two meals of chive boxes. Whether the chive boxes are fried or pan-fried—that’s up to the wives’ convenience. Either way is fine.

　　After cooking a big stack of dozens of chive boxes, the whole family can start eating. But there’s an order to how you eat them. The usual routine is: first, drink a bowl of fragrant “qianqian rice” (a type of rice porridge with fried soybeans), which stimulates your appetite and gets your digestive system going. Then, you can freely dig into the chive boxes. One or two, two or three—you can eat as many as you like. Keep eating until even the chive boxes that weren’t greasy start to feel greasy, and the ones that were very fragrant no longer seem so. That’s when you know you’re truly full and don’t need to eat any more. Then, just slowly sip another bowl of millet and black bean qianqian rice, and you’ll be completely satisfied.