Mee Sua Soup with Dumplings (菠菜饺子汤面)

I needed a quick lunch fix for Edda and me.  Earlier, I made a batch of chicken chive dumplings and freeze it for emergency such as a quick lunch idea and also an alternative for Evy when I didn't cook enough for her school's lunch box.  I checked my pantry and I had one bundle of somen left, just enough for both Edda and myself.  An lunch idea was formed as I remembered the way my mom cooked the somen for me during my confinement.  If you liked to check out my mom version just click under confinement.  It's similar to this except I added the spinach, dumplings, homemade glutinous rice wine and a little this and that.

Ginger Chicken with Homemade Wine

This is a Ginger Chicken with homemade rice wine that mostly consumed by a lady in confinement.  Chinese lady would be in a month of confinement when she gave birth to a baby.  During this month of confinement, she would be giving heaty food to eat.  Lots of ginger, sesame oil, homemade rice wine, red date tea, etc to help heal her body and to make her body strong.  I didn't get to eat the homemade rice wine while in both of my confinements but I did make sure I followed most of the traditional rules and ate lots of ginger and sesame oil.  You can say I am superstitious but I believed in natural Chinese medicine or tradition that passed down through generations.

After a bowl of this, you eat the ginger, wine stock and everything with the rice and you would be sweating afterward.  Wood-ear fungus is high in iron, protein, calcium, vitamins and said to prevent blood clotting and lower cholesterol.  The homemade glutinous rice wine has lots of benefits too.

Homebrew Glutinous Rice Wine

What prompted me to make my own glutinous rice wine in the first place was I tasted a sweet homemade glutinous rice wine before.  It was so sweet and made the stir-fried ginger chicken so sweet and flavorful.  The sweetness that came from the rice wine couldn't be compared with the sugar you added to make it sweet.  The natural sweetness that came from it was unbeatable.  The above picture was taken in day three of fermentation.  I used my slow cooker to ferment it because I don't have a big glass jar.  You can also use the ceramic pot (Corning ware).

I tasted the rice wine and it was sweet but not much alcohol content.  The sweetest I tasted was day six.  But after day seven and when I tasted the rice wine again it was less sweet and started to taste more alcohol.  Subsequently the alcohol taste became stronger, the sweetness was gone and it turned sour.  At first I wanted to ferment it for up to 45 days but I quickly harvested it at day 22 because I was afraid that as the alcohol content went up, it would be more sour.  I might have introduce some bacteria to turn the wine sour when I played with the wine too much, I almost checked it every other day by spooning it around and tasting the wine.  Because a successful one will still produce a sweet rice wine even at day 45.  It was my first try so pardon my curiosity.  At day 22, the wine tasted dry and sourish.  A failed first attempt at wine making for me but luckily it didn't turn moldy and still very fragrant.

This was the rice residue at day 22.  I used a sieve to squeeze out the wine by pressing it with a spoon.  You can use your hand and a cheese cloth if you prefer.  If your rice wine is sweet, you can keep this in the refrigerator and use it to make a Chinese rice wine dessert by adding water, egg drop and tang yuan.  Or use it in cooking or marinate meat/poultry.  Since mine was sour, I didn't bother to reuse this.

The rice wine that I got from 4 cups of glutinous rice and 2 wine biscuits.  I got a 750ml bottle of rice wine and the one you saw below.  It was white and muddy at first, but would turn clear once you let it sit in the refrigerator (see picture below).  Keep it in the refrigerator to stop the fermentation process.

Besides the 750ml bottle, the above was the extra that I got.  I cooked the above with my ginger chicken and would share the recipe in my next post.  Since it's sourish, I need to counter it with sugar in my cooking.