What I thought would be dumplings became potstickers...

yum

the dough doin' its thing

I'm trying to keep up and failing miserably

all that goodness

the before and after shots

stir it all up and add enough spoons/chopsticks for each helper

me pretending to be a true blogger

mother and daughter action shot

is she judging or just watching? you can never tell

 take note. this is how this stuff works

one down, 119 to go

getting better

now i try (and do not do so well)

 carol shows me again

 like mother, like daughter

progress

artsy

 observe the cheekbones

official

and they become pot-stickers. MAGIC

beauty

I feel now that I have interviewed more than one person on cooking, that I have somewhat of an extensive base of knowledge on the subject. That means that I am now very aware that no one uses a recipe. If they are good enough they just know. Carol told me that some cooks can smell if they added too much salt. (And then I was reading Joy Luck Club a couple days after and my favorite character Lindo bragged about how she could smell if she added too much salt to her food. I mean wow.) However, while that is incredibly impressive, I find it rather difficult to write down a good recipe. But I am going to do so anyways. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

DUMPLINGS (which can be made into potstickers if you just believe)

These delicious little morsels seem also to be known as jiaozi on the internets. From what I have gathered they are a tradition at Chinese New Year celebrations. Multiple places said that they were originally called “tender ears” because they were first made by a medicine man to treat frostbitten ears. Now they are eaten all year round. Those were the fun facts.

For the dough:

Ingredients

• 4 (ish) cups of flour
• 1 cup of water to 3 cups of flour therefore 1 ⅓ cups of water

Directions

• Use a bread maker or other automatic mixer
• pour all of your two ingredients in the bowl
• turn it on
• keep watch until it all sticks together and then let it mix for 40 minutes while you make the stuffing

For the filling:

    Ingredients

• over 1 lb of ground pork (just a package you can buy)
• chopped ginger (I’m gonna say a tablespoon)
• 4 finely chopped scallions
• 1 TB of dark soy sauce
• 1 TB of regular soy sauce (apparently there is a difference. if you, like me, are not that sophisticated I am sure that whatever you have will do)
• a pinch of pepper
• a pinch of garlic powder
• a sprinkling of chicken bullion
• a sprinkling of Chinese spice (I think it is the same thing as this)
• 1 TB of sugar
• just a lil’ bit of cooking wine
• 1 TB of salt
• a few tablespoons of olive oil
• some water
• vegetables--we used celery and cabbage (about 1 lb combined)

   

    Directions

1. For the meat put your pork in a bowl
2. Add the chopped ginger, scallion, soy sauces, pepper and garlic powder, chicken bouillon, Chinese spice, sugar, cooking wine, salt, olive oil, and water. (This means put all of the rest of your ingredients in the bowl.)
3. Stir with chopsticks counter clockwise and only that way
4. Let the meat sit while you deal with the vegatables
5. For the vegetable part of the filling chop up the cabbage and celery in the cuisinart until they are very very small little pieces (just look at the picture)
6. When they are the correct size add some salt
7. Then plop that stuff on a cheesecloth and squeeze out the water
8. Add your waterless vegetables to your meat and mix it (this time it can be mixed in any direction

For the dumplings:

    Ingredients

• premade dough
• premade filling
• flour

   

    Directions:

1. Cut your dough into about 120 little tiny balls
2. Roll these balls on a flat surface into tiny round, flat pieces of dough that are fatter towards the middle and thinner towards the edges. (This is a rather difficult task that involves a skill that is hard for me to write down because it was hard for me to do. Sorry about this. I warned you.)
3. Fill with around a teaspoon of filling. Basically you will be very aware if you have used too much because it will be hard to close the dumpling without it all spilling out.
4. Then pinch those suckers shut either with that area between your thumb and pointer finger or with the normal parts of your fingers that you use. I would try to tell you the fancy way to do it but I have found that it doesn't matter because they just need to be tightly shut so you can cook them and eat them.
5. Boil in water.
6. FOR POTSTICKERS: fry on a pan in oil

Serving suggestions: eat plain, with soy sauce, or with ketchup. Do not combine the two.

I understand that that recipe seems rather difficult to recreate. First let me say, I hope that I have relayed everything correctly. Now, here are two other sites (site one. site two.) trying to describe the same thing that I just did. They may have done it better, but I--as a person--am better and funnier.

If you do not feel up to trying to make these because it is difficult, but you still want an infusion of some culture, read Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. It is a beautiful compilation of interconnecting stories of four Chinese-born mothers and their four American-born daughters living in San Francisco. So there you go, culture.

Carol

 

I wasn't allowed to get any in action shots of her because she didn't think she was picture worthy that day. So here is one from a couple days (weeks) later. 

Amid the gossip and many failed attempts to stuff the dumplings artfully I asked Alyssa’s mom, Carol, a few questions. Only just a few.

“What was the first meal you made that you were proud of?”

Alyssa reminded her mother of the first meal that she made that she was not proud of.

“A couple green beans.”

Apparently, Carol did not know how to cook when she first started seeing Alyssa’s dad but she wanted to cook for him. So she put a handful of green beans into a huge pot of boiling water and that was their dinner. If you don’t think that’s cute, you need to acquire a heart.

“What is your favorite food?”

“Noodles with tomatoes and egg.”

I wish I knew how that tasted

“What is your favorite food to cook?”

“Dumplings”

Apparently when Carol came to the US she would make dumplings and sell them to restaurants for 10 cents a dumpling to pay for life. Mad respect. And also, I find it crazy that even though she stopped selling them, she hasn’t gotten sick of making them yet. Maybe she has continued to enjoy it because they are so tasty.

Potstickers and Polar Vortexes

Mary Price was my photographer. That is some artsy ish. I appreciate her skills.

Before

after

Mary Price and Courtney. I ship it. Just kidding.

Alyssa being elusive.

We ate this. It was like crunchy air. It was delicious.

Josh eating it.

 Josh after eating it.

Me lookin' classy and filling some dumplings. Observe the cheekbones.

sexy

Courtney looking hawt.

WE MADE THESE AND THEY WERE DELICIOUS SO WE ATE THEM ALL

We have had 10 snow days this year. It's like Frozen except not really. Because of all of these snow days I have not gotten anything done. While that does seem counterintuitive, it actually makes a lot of sense. Snow days mean vacation. It is hard for me to work on vacation. And that is why my grades have been falling like the temperatures. That was my poor excuse for not posting anything for a month. Maybe I should just say that my pet unicorn, Herbert and my pet dragon, Dudley, got into a tiff (because they have been stuck inside for too long due to this damn polar vortex) and Dudley accidentally angrily breathed fire on my laptop and it took me a month to fix it. That sounds better. Yes? yes. Moving on.

Before all of these snow days hit and knocked me off balance, before finals even, my friend, Alyssa, invited me over to her house to learn to make Chinese food. More accurately, I begged Alyssa to let me come over until she said “ok”. Finally, a month later on one unnaturally warm weekend right before the polar vortex hit (thanks for showing off your skills, climate change),

I drove over to her house to make dumplings. She texted me about two hours before I was supposed to show up and asked if I wanted to invite anyone else. I suggested one person. She suggested ten. I was overwhelmed. However between the two of us and ten invites to work with we settled on Mary Price, Courtney, Olivia and Josh. We love them so much we settled on them. You’re welcome, friends.

It was grand. We laughed through old yearbooks, watched intently as Alyssa’s mom whipped up the tastiest potstickers of life, and gossiped like no other.

After we made the dumplings into potstickers by frying them, we sat down with some soy sauce and ketchup and ate all 60 of them. I recognize that sounds disgusting but it actually was glorious. The disgusting part is that we ate cake after eating the dumplings.

Then we went downstairs to her dance studio (which still bewilders me because, to the best of my knowledge, Alyssa doesn’t dance) and gossiped, laughed, watched youtube videos, laughed more, and read Amazon reviews of Haribo Classic Sugarless Gummy Bears, and laughed so hard that pee might have been involved.