Jiaozi

So, in an effort to find some REAL Chinese food, I found a recipe for Jiaozi, Chinese Dumplings, on this website (thanks again, Andrea, You Rock!).  These dumplings are traditionally served at Chinese New Year, and you may have seen some like these featured on various cultural programs such as “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations” and “Ni Hao Kai Lan”

… Of course, if you don’t have a pre-schooler and are not obsessed with watching every show on China you can find, you may have missed these television gems… anyway…

So, I bought the ingredients, and thought that these could be a fun project for the girls and I to work on together.  It would also give us a real reason to use those chopsticks… besides for PB&J!

We began by chopping lots of mushrooms

We mixed them with ground pork, tofu, egg, seasoning, and a whole bunch of green onions.

Next came the labor-intensive part: folding them up!

Disclaimer: If you click on the recipe link, you will see that mine look nothing like theirs. That’s because I don’t live in China, and have to work with what I can find at WalMart. Instead of round wonton wrappers, I used egg roll wrappers, cut into quarters. You work with what you’ve got!

So next I had to figure out the best way to cook the dumplings. The recipe said to either boil or pan-fry/steam them. I have watched Bobby Flay use the pan method on “Throwdown With Bobby Flay,” and have also been waiting for that episode air again so I can observe more closely how he did it, but it’s not been on the schedule.  I opted to skip this one, and by now, Josh was home from work and wondering why dinner wasn’t edible yet.  So, I went with the boiling option.  It worked, but they didn’t turn out very attractive!

I remembered that on Ni Hao Kai Lan and other actual China travel shows they steam the dumplings in bamboo steamer basket-thingies.  I don’t have this bamboo basket, but I do have a steamer pot.  So I thought this might be the way to go.

It took longer this way, but they definitely kept the shape better.  Gracie and I enjoyed them.  Annie decided that making them was more appealing than actually eating them.  Josh thought it was taking too long and went for PB&J, not even having the decency to eat that with chopsticks (*gasp*).

In the end, I only used about a fourth of the dumpling filling because it was taking so long, but I realized that all it was, basically, is a meatball in a noodle.  So, I decided to use the leftovers to actually just make meatballs.

They were very yummy!  I don’t know that I’ll be making real dumplings very often, but the Chinese meatballs will definitely be served again.  (Of course, once Josh reads this and learns that they have mushrooms and tofu in them, he may not eat them again!)

In Benjamin news, he may be following in his Daddy’s footsteps when it comes to food pickiness, but for whatever reason, he seems to be happy to eat most anything off my plate…

… as long as I feed it to him with chopsticks! 

I guess he’s got enthusiasm too!

And finally, though I don’t actually give credence to fortunes, I do love opening fortune cookies.  I bought a box of them to go along with our Jiaozi, and when I opened mine, this was the fortune that came out: 

I thought it was appropriate!