Today is the second day of the second lunar month, known as "Dragon Raises its Head". In fact, this day is also called the Green Grass Festival, Pick Vegetable Festival, Spring Dragon Festival, Azure Dragon Festival, and Dragon Raises its Head Day. The dragon is a prominent mythical creature in ancient Chinese culture, symbolizing auspiciousness and dominion over the wind and rain. Therefore, people have customs such as supporting the dragon's head, inviting the green dragon, cutting the dragon's hair, eating dragon ears, tasting dragon gall, and consuming dragon scales. There are also taboos like stopping sewing and avoiding grinding.
To celebrate this occasion, the Yanqing County Service Company's various catering hotels have prepared "dragon sets", including "dragon ears", "dragon gall", and "dragon scales" delicacies. The so-called "dragon ears" refer to "dumplings", "dragon gall" refers to "fried rice cakes", and "dragon scales" are actually the familiar "spring pancakes".
The reporter specifically visited Yanqing New Wind Grand Hotel under the service company. Interviewing hotel pastry chef Xiao Aibo, he said that in preparation for the arrival of the second day of the second month, "Dragon Raises its Head", the hotel began preparing spring pancakes, dumplings, fried rice cakes, and other festive foods one day in advance. Especially the "dragon ears" dumplings, the hotel specially launched five colors, symbolizing "five blessings come to the door". "In fact, it's just adding freshly squeezed vegetable juice, carrot juice, taro juice, strawberry juice, or cocoa powder when kneading the dough, resulting in dumplings with corresponding green, yellow, light brown, red, and coffee colors," Xiao Aibo told the reporter. The "dragon scales" spring pancakes not only have various flavors such as bean sprout vegetarian spring rolls, shepherd's purse spring rolls, fruit and vegetable filling spring rolls, and leek spring rolls, but also hundreds of them were prepared to meet customer demands on that day.