Heehee cravings are quite subdued after a satisfying bowl of tang yuan. When I took the tang yuan out to defreeze, I thought the picture on the plastic wrapping looked familiar, so I turned over and realised that it's made in Singapore. Haha so patriotic huh... support Singapore products man. Hmm then I realised that it's probably the brand that we used to have at home. Not sure, but it really would seem too coincidental that two different Singaporean brands of tangyuan might have the same picture on the wrapper.

But commercial tang yuans, nice and sweet as they are, can't be compared to the homemade ones. The ones that my grandma makes are small and they come in white or pink. Usually those that are offered to the gods/dieties/buddhas(???) will have small pieces of... er I dunno what it is. It's hard and light brownish, like the colour of light brown sugar, and when the tang yuan is cooked, it melts to become a sweet syrup. Yumz. The others will usually have either nian yong or dou sa, depending on what my auntie gets to make the tang yuan with. When I was young I used to help and it was really fun. But sometimes it would be disappointing to eat cos the size of the tangyuan is so small that there's often not enough filling inside, so there are like a lot of tang yuan that have no taste. I used to prefer the pink tang yuans, weird preference haha.

I'm also missing the peanut soup(?) that we used to have at home when we cooked our own tang yuan. It comes in a can and is not as nice as those that are sold in hawker centres la, but it's nice enough. I couldn't find anything like it in the canned food section of Day In, too bad. Actually, usually we don't cook our own tang yuan at home on dong zhi itself. Cos in addition to eating tang yuan at my grandma's after dinner, there will usually be a lot of left over tang yuan to be ta pao-ed home... my grandma doesn't exercise quantity control!

Merry Christmas! =)