Happy Mid-Autumn Festival

Published on by Yinglan

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中秋节快乐!-Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

Instead of posting the same post each year, I have decided to write a new post this year.

Mid-Autumn Festival occurs on August 15 on the lunar calendar, which is why every year is different. Knowing the lunar calendar is important in some aspect like if you know the month and day you were born on the lunar calendar, you can have two birthdays. I was born on August 17 on the lunar calendar, which is two days after Mid-Autumn Festival. This means, I get to celebrate my birthday early. Yay! See the benefit?

We also eat moon cakes but what you see in the above and below pictures are 绿豆碰, Taiwanese Moon cakes. My mom made it.

We are not from Taiwan by the way but does it matter to have Taiwanese Moon cakes? Not at all. It’s just like everyday food. In fact, you can make these any day of the year but unfortunately, the recipe is in Chinese. Still, you can click on this link and use Google to translate it into whatever language you want.

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There’s not much going on this year. My mom is hosting a small party in her classroom. “Chinese Club,” she called it. She invited me but before I could say anything, she declined the invitation for me. “You wouldn’t want to go.” She said and I had the suspicion her next words would be, “You won’t fit in.” But it wasn’t. It was, “You wouldn’t want to be around a bunch of International students.”

That’s true. They drove me insane when I was teaching my own small group of Chinese international students a few years ago. Besides, if I went, I’d probably be the odd person out, standing in the corner drinking tea and eating moon cake.

I don’t fit in with them. I’d be an outsider to their tightly-knitted group. My mom is already an outsider. Also, their constant staring at their phone screen is very offensive because I don’t know when they’re listening. I hope it doesn’t go disastrous though, otherwise, I’ll have to hear about like I do nowadays about how her students don’t understand math.

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Now, this is a Cantonese Moon Cake. I believe it’s a white lotus with two egg yolks. It’s the last one from a box my mom bought early August. We’ve already ate the rest. We did this last year too and in the end, eight moon cakes later, I’ve grown tired of it. This year, I’ve been controlling myself and letting my mom eat most of it. She needs the weight gain. Me, I need to lose weight.

Anyway, I wish anyone who celebrate this holiday a Happy Mid-Autumn Festival.

 

13 thoughts on “Happy Mid-Autumn Festival”

  2. I just picked up moon cakes at Costco for the mid-autumn festival. Friends of ours lives in China for a season a few years ago and brought us some back — they weren’t really to my taste, but we loved having the experience! I’ll have to try out the recipe next go round 😉

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    1. Costco has moon cakes? Maybe it varies by area because I’ve never seen moon cakes at the Costco here. We usually just go to Chinatown since they have Cantonese moon cakes there. I don’t know if there are moon cakes up north or if they’re different but yeah, at times, moon cakes are an acquire taste.

      Yeah, try the recipe and let me know how it works out. It was pretty simple for my mom. She even improvised the filling by substituting the green tea powder as shown in the recipe with dry shredded meat to bring out some salty taste.

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      1. We live in Seattle, home of Costco. We also have the luxury of having diverse communities of ethnicities, including Chinese, with Chinese and Asian markets that cater to local transplants.

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      2. Ah I see. That makes sense because I’ve seen some strange Asian foods when I visited the California Costcos. Meanwhile, here in Utah, every Costco is pretty standard. The only Asian food that stands out is Sushi.

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  4. Very interesting! The moon cakes look delicious but I am not enthusiastic enough to translate the recipe from Chinese to English. LOL!! I wouldn’t fit in with those students either and I hope you don’t have to listen to your mom complain if her party doesn’t go well.

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