One of my favorite memories from Guangzhou was waking up early on Laba Festival to make laba congee. Laba Festival falls on the eighth day of the last lunar month (臘月 Làyuè), and every year, people will cook a big pot of this winter porridge for their ancestors and then enjoy it with friends and family, since its bountiful ingredients symbolize a celebration of the harvest.
In my culinary school kitchen, a team of chefs simmered the soaked sticky rice, beans, dried fruits, and other grains in 5-liter stock- pots, while the rest of us helped set up a table near the street by the ferry station. We ladled out the congee into lidded paper cups and then wove in and out of the crowd, offering them with our blessings. Later I took a cup myself and spooned up the hot congee gratefully, chewing on the treasures suspended in the thickened rice porridge— starchy lotus seeds, rich peanuts, plump golden raisins, and swelled jujube dates and sweet longan.
Since making the porridge is a tradition over a thousand years old, the ingredients can vary widely. Typically, people include different types of grains (white sticky rice, black rice or black sticky rice, cornmeal, millet, Job’s tears, and oats), beans (mung beans, red adzuki beans, kidney beans), nuts (walnuts, chestnuts, almonds, peanuts), seeds (pumpkin seeds, lotus seeds, pine nuts), and dried fruits (raisins, dates, goji berries), which naturally sweeten the porridge. It’s a very flexible and forgiving recipe, and if you don’t have some of these ingredients, simply substitute more of the others. At home, my mom always makes it in her pressure cooker, which cuts down the active cooking time to almost nothing. Just soak everything the night before, then drain and add to the pot in the morning, and you can enjoy a hot bowl of it for breakfast.