Lotus Leaf Wraps (Lo Mai Gai)

This dish is not hard to make, but does take a long time to prep. We started at 6pm and ended at midnight. so watch out for a long prep time.

The recipe says it makes 8 and we doubled it but actually still only got 8 servings, so the portion sizes are a bit off.

Also, the steaming of the rice is what took forever to get the right texture -- instead of 40 min (if you double the recipe it is 40 instead of 20 min) it actually took us about double the time (80 min). One thing we did wrong was to cram all the rice into one bamboo steamer, but after taking forever, we realize we should have separated the portion to two steamers going at the same time. This went faster but the overall process still took some time.

What was time consuming was also the presoaking of the leaves, rice, and mushrooms, and all the chopping. Then you had to wait until the rice and chicken mixture were both cooled enough to then wrap individually. Like I said, this is definitely not a 30 minute meal!!

Once everything was prepped however, the cooking and assembly was pretty simple. Going to steam these just in time for our meet-up tomorrow. Since this made 8 exactly, we didn't get a chance to taste them yet. The chicken mixture was tasty though, so hopefully they will come out good tomorrow.