Chinese Hawthorn Candy (Haw Flakes)

My kids' Chinese grandparents always give this candy to my kids. Haw flakes are a Chinese candy made from the berry of the Hawthorn bush. It is supposed to be nutritious and especially good for the digestion. The flakes come in a jar full of little wrapped rolls like rolls of coins. Each roll contains a stack of flakes. The flakes are thin, somewhat dry, and have a grainy texture with a sweet and sour taste.

Left: Haw flakes. Right: Haw cheese.

A new one my in-laws found is "haw cheese." How do the Chinese come up with these translations? It is a hawthorn candy which has a moister, chewy, "fruit roll-up" texture in a little striped block. I like the lady on the package. Thanks to her haw cheese she's energized and ready to kick butt.

My kids adore these hawthorn sweets. You can find them at most any Asian market.

Hawthorn berry

Moon Cakes!

Last Thursday was Chinese Moon Festival. My kids are half Chinese so I decided we needed some moon cakes! I did some googling and found out Moon Festival, also known as Mid-Autumn Festival, celebrates the harvest and family, and the harvest moon...cool! People return to their villages or their hometowns and spend the day with their families, and they have a feast. It sounds kind of like Chinese Thanksgiving. And they eat mooncakes! They are pretty little pastries with lotus seed paste inside. No idea what lotus seed paste was like, but they sounded yummy. I'd never even seen a mooncake before. They are expensive, I discovered. We were shopping and I saw they had some for sale at the local Asian market. For around $30 for a box. Of four. Wow.

Moon cakes

Aren't they beautiful? Wow, so pretty. No wonder they are so expensive. Inside each one is lotus seed paste filling, and in the center is a salted egg yolk, which looks like the moon when you cut the mooncake. You are supposed to eat the mooncake by cutting it into four pieces and sharing, because it is so rich.

Lotus seed paste filling and an egg yolk in the center

The lotus seed paste tastes like sweetened peanut butter! Yummy. And the egg yolk is salty. The mooncake reminds me of a peanut butter cup, without the chocolate. It's very sweet and salty and rich. My oldest child hated the mooncake (but he is super picky and hates most foods) and my 2-year-old liked the lotus seed part but spit out the egg yolk. But I liked it!

My son and I also made some Chinese lanterns out of construction paper. It's an easy craft. Here's the instructions we used:

Chinese Lantern Tutorial

After we made and decorated our lanterns, I hung them over our dining table (taped them to the light fixture), and we went out to look at the moon, which on Moon Festival night is full, and it's supposed to be the brightest moon of the year. It was very bright, and we could see easily in the moonlight. Happy Moon Festival!

Making Chinese Peanuts

This is one of my favorite recipes that my kids' Chinese grandparents make. Every time I go to their house I find these in the fridge and I have to attack them with chopsticks. It's a great snack and they are so fun to eat with chopsticks. They are salty, flavorful and crunchy, but not in the way that we're used to in America, where we eat our peanuts dry-roasted. They are moist, and perhaps more like a vegetable than a nut. Think edamame (soybeans), if you've ever had those. To get the ingredients you will need to go to an Asian supermarket. You can find the peanuts there; they are shelled and raw (not roasted or salted). These are 12 oz bags and I used one for this recipe.

You'll need a 12 oz package of raw shelled peanuts.

Then you'll need some wonderful exotic spices. 

Talk about fragrant! Red peppercorns, cinnamon sticks, and star anise.

The star anise is so pretty! 

Star anise.

Then there's  fresh ginger. You only need a tiny bit of ginger, so buy a small knob of it, and maybe have another recipe ready to use it in so it isn't wasted.

Fresh ginger.

Put the peanuts in a saucepan and add enough water to cover them. Then add two slices of ginger and 2 anise stars. For the red peppercorns, I use a half-teaspoon size measuring spoon as a scooper and scoop out a rounded spoonful of peppercorns and throw them in the pot. Then you'll need a tiny piece of cinnamon bark. These are the size pieces I'm talking about:

Tiny bits of cinnamon bark.

One or two of these is enough. A little goes a long way. Now everything's in the pot. Bring it to a boil. I put the lid on but leave a gap to let steam out, and cook it for 20 minutes on medium-high.

After 20 minutes, turn off the stove and add a tablespoon of salt (or more or less, depending how salty you like things) and let the peanuts soak for at least a half-hour. When they are done soaking, we eat them warm immediately, and the leftover peanuts we eat cold from the fridge. Scoop them out of their broth and into a bowl, and be careful not to eat the anise, peppercorn, ginger, or cinnamon bits (warn the kids). These peanuts are best eaten with chopsticks, which just makes it more fun! Yummy!