Carrot & Pork Dumplings

In May, I reviewed Beyond the Great Wall by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, and I did this dumpling recipe for the meal I made for my family. Out of the seven items I made, the dumplings were by far the most popular.

I'd never made Asian dumplings before, having written them off as too fiddly and not worth it. I learned, however, that they are soooooooooo worth the effort, because nothing is as comforting, warming, and nourishing as a bowl of steaming hot noodles filled with yummy stuff. For a Magazine Monday post, I made a Canadian Living dumpling recipe using shrimp, and they were awesome.

My SIL just had surgery on her right arm, so I was thinking of what I could make for a family meal that wouldn't require cutting, and, since I'm in comfort food mode these days due to my ever-fluctuating mood, the dumplings seemed to fit the bill.

Carrot and Pork Dumplings, adapted from page 150-151 of Beyond the Great Wall

1 medium carrot, grated
1/4lb ground pork (or ground lamb)
2 tsp minced garlic
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp roasted sesame oil
(I also added some finely chopped green onion since I had some left over)

NB: While the recipe in the book has us making our own dumpling dough from the Kazakh Noodle dough recipe, I have chosen instead to go with the easier and lazier route of using won-ton wrappers found in my local over-priced grocery store. I also double the recipe to feed four hungry people as a main course. The original recipe also instructs the cook to parboil the carrot, but I get around that step by just grating the carrot right into the filling mixture.

Method

Mix all the ingredients together until well-combined. I used my hands, but if you want, a fork works well, too.

Place a scant 1 - 1 1/2 tsp filling in each won-ton wrapper (I have a #100 cookie scoop that works perfectly for this). Wet a pastry brush with some water and brush the edges of the won-ton wrapper. Pinch to seal and set aside on a baking sheet.

Bring a large pot of water to a vigorous boil. Ten at a time (or thereabouts), toss in the dumplings and wait for the water to come back to the boil. After about a minute, the dumplings will float to the surface and bob around. Cook them for about another half a minute or so, then, using a skimmer, spider, or slotted spoon, scoop them out of the pot and put them into a bowl. Repeat. Serve piping hot with dipping sauce.

Soy Vinegar Dipping Sauce (page 151)
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup rice vinegar (the original recipe specifies Jinjiang, a black rice vinegar, but I don't have any Asian specialty stores close by, so I just used the rice vinegar I could find)
2 tbsp shredded ginger

For this particular meal, I served the dumplings with a cabbage slaw I made using shredded cabbage, grated carrot, grated radishes, chopped cilantro, and sliced green onions, dressed with a Tamari Peanut salad dressing purchased from the "reduced for quick sale" bin at my local overpriced grocery store. My SIL made a Thai rice noodle salad with a peanut butter and lime-flavoured dressing. All in all, a totally satisfying meal.

The one thing I did learn, though, is that not all won-ton wrappers are created equal. The new ones I bought for this meal were very thin, broke easily when stuffed, and dried out very quickly. The older ones from the BtGW meal where thicker and sealed better, and were definitely easier to work with. So, I'll go back to that brand next time.

Magazine Monday #3: Shrimp Dumplings

Although I had quite a productive day today, my mood was low and I was craving comfort foods. Since I don't have a car, giving into the urge of chips and chocolate would have entailed walking downtown to the local overpriced grocery store, and I just couldn't be bothered. I wanted something filling and satisfying, not necessarily junky. I considered pasta, but this recipe for shrimp dumplings has been in my mind for a few days now, since I went through my magazine collection the other day. I happened to have the ingredients on hand, including won ton wrappers left over from my Beyond the Great Wall meal.

This is, once again, a Canadian Living recipe, and can be found here. I left out certain things, like the hot sauce (don't like it), the cooking wine (don't have any), and the edamame beans (purely for presentation). I also left out the egg white; when I made the pork dumplings for the BtGW meal, I didn't need it, so I figured I wouldn't need it here, either, and I was right.

I just wanted to dig in, so I didn't bother dressing this up at all to photograph it. I did use my new Asian noodle bowl set for the first time, which was kinda cool. To serve, I splashed some soy sauce over the dumplings and accompanied them with a simple Asian cabbage slaw made from shredded savoy cabbage, grated carrot, some green onions and cilantro, doused with seasoned rice vinegar and soy sauce. It was everything I wanted: yummy, fresh, filling, and totally satisfying. And the work wasn't so bad; much more worth it in the end than hiking down to the store for chips & chocolate (though, tomorrow is another day...).

Cookbook Review: Beyond the Great Wall

The flap reads: "In the West, when we think about food in China, what usually comes to mind are the signature dishes of Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. But beyond these urbanized eastern areas lies the other China: the high open spaces and sacred places of Tibet, the Silk Road oases of Xinjinag and Qinghai, the steppelands of Inner Mongolia, and the sleepy terraced hills of Yunnan and Guizhou. The people who live in these regions - Tibetans, Mongols, Uighurs, Miao, Hui, Dong, Yi, Dai, and others - are culturally distinct, with their own culinary traditions."

Beyond the Great Wall is indeed a cookbook like no other. It combines the best of many writing genres: travel, autobiography, National Geographic-quality photography, history, geography, and culinary literature. The content is as varied as the some fifty-five other minorities living in the three fifths of land of China not dominated by the Chinese majority, the Han. And the Han is what we typically see or think of when it comes to Chinese people, and their food traditions are the ones we are most familiar with, the ones that come from the well-known urban centres of Beijing and Hong Kong. The authors, couple Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, also authors of Hot Sour Salty Sweet, take the reader on a very experiential tour of those minorities that lay beyond the Great Wall of China, sometimes the tiniest, most isolated corners of a vast former empire that encompasses today an ethnic variety that is truly stunning.

The book is divided into chapters as most cookbooks are: soups, salads, breads, fish, etc. Accompanying each chapter and interspersed between recipes, we get small vignettes of travel stories written from the authors' own experiences while travelling beyond the Great Wall, in addition to histories written about the minorities being explored in the book. The photographs are lush and capture so well the unique qualities and characteristics of some of the worlds most fascinating, but little heard of, cultures.

The food is stunning, too. For the purposes of this review, I decided to have my family over for dinner last night and make a menu derived from the book. My initial response to the recipes was, Uh, I'm not going to be able to find any of the ingredients I'd need to make this here in the boonies. But the more I read, the more I was able to figure out substitutes, and the more recipes I found were very appealing and would involve simple ingredients prepared through simple methods. I now go through the book pretty much thinking that I could make any of these dishes, and bring some little semblance of these out of the way cultures into my home, a world away.

The menu consisted of:

Kazakh Family Loaf (page 195)
Napa & Red Onion Salad (page 86)
Beef-Sauced Hot Lettuce Salad (page 67)
Hui Tomato-Lamb Noodle Soup, which I substituted beef in for the lamb (page 59)
Savory Boiled Dumplings with Soy-Vinegar Dipping Sauce (pages 150-151)
Beef with Mushrooms & Cellophane Noodles, which I substituted chicken for the beef (page 280)
Green Tea Shortbread with Poppy Seeds (page 329), served with Watermelon

Here we have the Kazakh Family Loaf at two stages: dough and

fully risen. It's baked in a cast iron pot.

The salad is Napa & Red Onion, and this is the baked loaf and the shortbread.

These are the dumplings before cooking and after cooking, and the Hui soup.









And finally, this is the Chicken and Mushrooms with Cellophane Noodles.

Some dishes we liked more than others. The unanimous favourite was the dumplings, and the least popular was the soup. Not that it was bad at all, it was just a bit bland, so we used the dipping sauce left over from the dumplings to spice it up, and then it was great. I thought the mushroom dish was really good, too. The shortbread was excellent, as was the Kazakh Loaf, which I think will become one of my staple bread recipes.

All in all, Beyond the Great Wall is an excellent book. It's probably, at the moment, the nicest, most interesting book I own. It would make a great gift for someone with wanderlust or for a cultured friend who might appreciate the experiences the book narrates. Definitely a keeper on my shelves!