One of my favourite food has to be glutinous rice (or sticky rice) -- cooked in different shapes and forms. From muah chee (a chewy glutinous rice flour-based Singaporean dessert), tang yuan (glutinous rice balls), Chinese rice dumplings, and lor mai fun (steamed glutinous rice in Cantonese).
I recently cooked lor mai fun, and was rather satisfied with its outcome, going by dad's thumbs-up. I made the base for the stock from raw peanuts, pork bones, garlic and mushrooms, boiled in water. I stir-fried the soaked rice grains in the peanut soup and steamed the lightly fried rice (still flooded in the soup) in the rice cooker. And viola, this is what you get! Of course, it's not complete without fried onions and a dash of white pepper powder.
When I was in the fateful city a decade ago, I reacted with disbelief when someone told me that the walls of Nanjing were stuck together with glutinous rice .
Now I understand that glutinous rice flour was also used to bind the bricks in building the Great Wall of China during the Qin Dynasty (221-226 BC). It appears that sticky rice significantly contributed to the walls’ robust endurance due to its cohesive properties yielded by amylopectin inherent in the rice.
Oh, and this technology is being revived for investigation, so I learnt.