LABA Porridge--LABA festival

Today I'm going to introduce everybody a really healthy Chinese traditional food. It's called Laba porridge. 

Laba porridge is one of the most interesting traditional Chinese porridges. The Chinese made it from a variety of materials.  

People use yellow rice, white rice, polished glutinous rice, millet, water caltrop kernel, peel chestnuts, red cowpea, and pasted jujube. They boiled all the material with water. Then they use dyed red peach kernel, almond, melon seeds, peanuts, hazelnut, pine nuts and white sugar, brown sugar, and  grapes as decoration. Then they mix all the materials and eat together.

People eat this particular porridge on the Laba festival. They eat it to celebrate the harvest. On the Laba festival, Chinese people worship ancestors and gods. They pray for harvest and good luck for the next year. At the same time, people eat Laba porridge to remind themselves and their posterity to save food, and to be a hard-working and thrifty person.

  Another story is about people who want to commemorate the national hero Fei Yue. It is said that in the way of the war, Fei Yue’s soldiers were too hungry. People from Henan province got together and put all different grains in the pot, then boiled them into porridge to keep the soldiers out of hunger and cold. Then Fei Yue’s army won and they became the heroes. People wanted to remember that day then they started to eat this kind of porridge every year on the Laba Day.