A
rice bag (sometimes
rice mush) is sort of like a Chinese sandwich. There are other Chinese snacks that are actually probably more sandwich like such as
char siu bao, but I can't really think of any other western
analogue. In its most basic form it is made of
glutinous rice, meat, and seasonings (
soy sauce).
The rice is seasoned and worked a bit to make it bind better, like kneading dough except there isn't any
gluten to work. The result, similar to a coarse
mochi is wrapped around the cooked meat filling in the form of a
tetragonal disphenoid and wrapped with
bamboo leaves and string.
This package is then steamed to impart the flavour of the leaves to the rice and eaten. I was taught that the proper way to eat a rice bag is to remove the string and unwrap the rice, if you haven't a plate you can just leave it sitting on the unfolded leaves. Use the string to cut the parcel into mouth sized pieces and eat with chopsticks. Alternately, if you're in a rush, there's no reason to be a little informal and eat it like a sandwich using the leaves as a wrapper.
The flavour is a combination of sweet,
smoky, and the flavour of the filling. It's similar to Chinese
sticky rice, in fact it
is more or less sticky rice in a wrapper.
DMan has a recipe under
glutinous rice that calls for
lotus leaves rather than
bamboo leaves. Either will do. The rice bags I bought tonight were wrapped in bamboo, but the ones I ate 2 nights ago were in lotus leaves.