Potstickers and spring rolls

You may find it surprising, but I do more cooking on Sundays and Mondays combined than I do any other day of the week. It's possible that Josh would challenge this statement, but I doubt it.

Saturday night, we watched a Bobby Flay Throwdown on dumplings. I don't make dumplings very much, but I have a friend at work who makes them every weekend with her family. I really feel like I should make them more. So, armed with my trusty Chinese cookbooks, I decided to make Cecilia Chiang's potstickers, because if you are going to make something from Beijing, you might as well go to the source, right? So I whipped up one of these recipes. Then I folded them as I had been taught, whether that was right or not.

And I cooked them like the book said, though I probably messed it up because I didn't get quite the crisp I was expecting. And then I served it with my normal dipping sauce instead of the one in the book, but they were still good. And I have 30 more in the freezer.

I should mention that I ground the pork butt with my trust Waring Pro grinder on the finest grind for some meatballs and I really feel like you could feel and taste the difference as you ate the potstickers.

So I bought the items for spring rolls because with the pork and napa cabbage, I already had two of them, forget that I bought pork just for these. So when I came home today, the first thing I did was soak the doong goo, the Chinese dried shiitakes, so they would be ready. Then I cut up all the veg and pork and cooked it all together. I forgot the shrimp but you barely noticed they were missing.

Then I made my flour paste, rolled them up, and fried them.

Mmmm, delicious. Who needs anything else for dinner?

Okay, I did. I ate a bunch of the Decimal Place tuma to fill my tummy, along with the Pine Ridge Chenin Blanc which is making it pretty hard to type.