February 11th, 2006
Dumplings
I just have one chinese friend, her name is Zhonghua. She is the sweetest, most gentle person I have ever come across. The first time I went to her house for dinner, she was going to make pork dumplings, then when I told her I dont eat pork, she felt so bad, she then started to make shrimp dumplings.
I had mentioned her son in one of my earlier recipes, his name is Xueyu. He is so cute, he loves drawing pictures, and is amazingly bright kid.
This is a genuine chinese recipe for making dumplings. A little work is involved, but its amazingly healthy and delicious.
Ingredients:
for the filling:
ground meat/ground chicken/finely chopped shrimp/chopped vegetables like carrots
green onion,
garlic,
ginger,
salt as per taste,
oil
for the dough:
flour,
water,
salt
Chop green onion, garlic and ginger into small pieces (If possible use a food processor to chop the ginger and garlic into really fine pieces).
Add a little water gradually to ground meat/chicken and stir in one direction until it is tender.
Add the finely chopped green onion, garlic, ginger to this and stir. Add salt to the ground meat/chicken/shrimp and mix well, then add oil and stir.
Put the filling in the center of a dough and seal it, by pressing it with fingers. (You may need to dip your finger in a water and then moisten the edges to seal.)
There are two ways to cook this:
1) Boil water in a big pot, and add the dumplings to it few at a time, when they start floating, they are cooked(its just a couple of minutes). Remove them, draining the water out as much as you can.
2)Heat oil, and deep fry the dumplings.
Serve hot with sesame oil and soy sauce.
Note: If you want to make it with shrimp or plain vegetables, just chop everything very small, I cannot do that, I use a food processor.
If you are using ground meat/chicken, then you need to add the water in the beginning, not for shrimp or vegetables.