Sticky Rice Wrapped in Bamboo Leaves (Joong or Zhongzi)

A soy-free version of the Chinese Sticky Rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves, known as Joong, or Zhongzi that are traditionally eaten in late Spring for the Dragonboat Festival. You can buy them at Asian supermarkets (like T&T here), and my husband’s family makes them, but they all have ingredients my son can’t have. Usually these have dried shrimp or scallop, mushrooms, nuts, soy sauce, 5-spice powder, chinese sausage and egg, but yummy as they are, these all make my son itchy, so I improvised! Special thanks to W.K. Leung for his pictorial description here: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=88644 You may want to see the pictures of the various packages he uses. If you don’t need to avoid all those ingredients, you’ll probably want to follow his recipe, as this one is a little bland (shhh, don’t tell my son…) Wrapping the dumplings is tricky – I had to watch a few different videos, and even then, my first one took about 20 minutes! Eventually I figured it out. My best ones ended up as somewhat rectangular pyramids, rather than the tetrahedrons I usually see. This is a fairly time-consuming project, most families make it a group activity! Preparation time below is for one person doing it all herself for the first time, with a little “help” from my little man, and does not include overnight soaking time.