Every time I find myself in an Asian market/strip mall, I look for a bakery serving authentic sweets. In particular, I look for that delightful confection/dessert that seems to have various different names depending on the ethnic background of the bakery. Once upon a time, I thought these light, sugary-peanutty-filled deserts were known as mochi. But my Hawaii trip in 2006 and some treats brought home by a traveling Taiwanese friend educated me that the name commonly referred to the Japanese preparation of this dessert, sans coconut powder dusting. While I found the chewier Japanese-style mochi delicious in their own right, they could not compare to my all-time favorite Chinese sticky rice balls. So I turned to Google to discover the correct name, pronunciation, and label of this fabulous dessert. “Glutinous rice balls” and “sticky rice balls” directed me to the Wiki page on the subject. Why, those sweet filled dumplings must be called tangyuan (or tungyuen), right? Not so, for the name denoted a syrupy or soupy preparation for the sticky rice ball. And I don’t remember dipping my spoon into a bowl for these particular sticky rice balls. Zongzi? Not the same either, as it recalled the Filipino snack known as suman, a sticky rice dessert cake steamed in banana leaves and topped sugar and/or coconut. (Omg, I LOVE suman!)

I scoured the Chowhound forums looking for some clue, but these hounds’ ethnic food experiences were clearly lacking. Back to Google again, as we tried searching for “dim sum glutinous rice balls peanuts” which led us to discover this illustrated page on all good things dim sum. There it was, pictured near the bottom of the page, snuggled next to ma-lei-chann and ma-dau-go…Nor-maai-chi. Google made sure to supply an alternate spelling, nor mai chi. Also known as: coconut snowballs, a Cantonese dessert.

Another pleasant discovery while browsing that illustrated dim sum page: I finally found out the name of that deep fried sticky rice dumpling that we all loved and knew as “the football” due to its obvious shape. We used to order it all the time at the now-defunct Lucky House and at other dim sum spots in Richardson (aka Maxim’s, Hong-Kong-Royale-turned-Kirin-Court) and referred to it most commonly as “deep fried shrimp pie”. Turns out it’s also known as: ham sui gok, a combination pork dumpling.