Hubei watercress with watercress

As a folk snack with a long history, Douban has a cooking custom in many places in China. In Hubei, usually during the slack season in winter, people begin to make watercress to prepare for the New Year. Douban is a folk snack handed down from family to family. The raw materials used are different, and each family has its own flavor. The main raw material of bean curd is rice (or glutinous rice), and the auxiliary raw materials are mung beans, soybeans and buckwheat.

Choose a sunny day and soak the raw materials in a wooden bucket or jar with tofu. If there are few soybeans, use a smaller bucket. Cleaning after soaking for a whole day, including peeling mung beans, is to put mung beans in a basket and sink them in water, and the skin floating on them will overflow. Then, mix them together and grind them for later use. Ask a master who can scald bean skin and three or five sisters-in-law who cut bean skin to arrange the division of labor.

First of all, the master who scalds bean skin must be skilled. There are two pots on the earthen stove in the country. The master picked a spoonful of rice paste from a clean mussel shell and quickly sprinkled it into a boiling pot. Then, he used the back of mussel shell to paste rice paste evenly along the edge of the pot and baked it into a very thin cake. Often the pulp is put in one pot, and the cake in the other pot is just fine, so it takes turns to take out the pot, saving time. The cake just out of the pot is spread in the dustpan, thin and yellow, with green silk. When the cold wind blows, it's not that hot. Sister-in-law sat on the bench and skillfully rolled into filaments.