Chinese new year cooking

Chinese new year is meant to be a day without work. It's also a day that you are supposed to celebrate by eating. For me, the days leading up to new year involve so much cleaning that I never get to make anything in advance. Lucky for me that I enjoy the cooking instead of consider it work.

Definitely over-zealous in my planning, I planned to do small batches of spring rolls and dumplings, along with daikon cake which I haven't made in a while.

These are recipes I grew up with. I looked them up in my recipe book for fun, and their recipes are very very vague. For daikon cake, all I have listed is "4:1" and "rice flour".

Spring rolls

For my spring roll filling, I use pre-peeled tiny little shrimp, pork, napa cabbage, carrots, and doong goo, dried Chinese shitake mushrooms.

For the pork, since we were at BHFM, I waited a long time to get an apparently locally-grown hormone-free pork butt, five pounds of it. I only used a small chunk for the spring rolls, but it was too much because I ended up having to double all my other ingredients to match quantity-wise.

I usually microwave the carrots, but the handle recently broke off, so I sauteed them, adding in water to help steam them along. The cabbage is chopped, parboiled, then squeezed out.

Saute all ingredients together and add salt.

Then the folding. My mother insists that spring rolls should be pretty thin. They fry up golden and represent money at the new year. After rolling, you use a cooked flour/water mixture as paste to keep it together.

Since I was frying to order, I only folded a few at a time. One of the easiest spring roll experiences ever. Even if they did take forever to prep.

The frying is best at a highest temp. 350 is okay but 375 is ready. At some point, I always flip them over and hold them upside down (since they will automatically try to stay on one side) to fry them evenly on both sides.

They come out super hot and it's a bit before you can eat them without hurting yourself. I like to dip mine in worchestershire.

Daikon cake

Armed with my very detailed recipe -- 4:1 and rice flour -- I minced lap cheong (Chinese sausage), dried shrimp, and doong goo. I grated my daikon. I measured and mixed.

Normally, this really should be much heavier on the daikon but I seriously misjudged how much daikon I would have. This is the problem with pure estimation based on eye.

I mixed everything together.

Then you put your mixture into a pan. Normally I buy aluminum pans for this, but i have the perfectly sized pan at home so I used that. Glad that worked out so well. Then you put it into the steamer for 30 min.

After 30 minutes, it's done. You take it out to cool. This time, I let it cool completely in the pan before taking it out. Since Josh was traveling, I had this for dinner the day after new year.

You slice it up and then pan fry it with oil.

I'm not terribly neat with slicing my daikon cake because it's just for me to eat. I like it with oyster sauce. It's pretty damn good.

Dumplings

It's amazing how you can make a recipe for years and realize you've been doing it wrong. My dumpling filling is raw and it's shrimp (yes, those tiny peeled ones), pork (yes, the remaining pork butt I got at BHFM), and napa cabbage. And salt. That's what I had been missing this whole time.

I had no idea how many skins I would need, but I bought six packages. I assumed there were maybe 25 to 50 skins per pack. (For future reference, it's more like 75.) Normally I buy the Shanghai-style skins, mainly because that's what I think I grew up with. They are white and I always buy the round ones. What I learned after I bought them but before I folded the dumplings is that Hong Kong style wonton wrappers 1) have egg and 2) are thinner. Indeed, they were pretty thin.

I also grew up putting a pretty small amount of filling into each dumpling but I was seeing plumper dumplings so I decided to go heavy on the filling. Still, I like three pleats per side.

In the past, I would fold the dumplings and put them on a tray. Then I would put them into the freezer for an hour or two to freeze them, then put them in bags. Except I was noticing that they don't freeze in an hour and then they all stick together into a big ball in the freezer bag. Then the cooking process involves a lot of dumpling ball separation.

So this time, I floured my trays and put the dumplings in overnight to freeze.

I realized that I clearly needed to fold too many dumplings. (In the end, I folded 200 total dumplings.) For that second night of folding, I set aside 10 and then 6 more to cook and eat immediately. They turned out so light and delicious. I hope they stay that way when frozen. The skins were very silky and delicate.

The white stuff in the photo is bunches of flour that stuck to the dumplings. For future batches, I brushed off the flour after they froze to try to minimize it.

I was able to fit 24 dumplings per tray with two trays in the freezer at once. The third and last day of folding, I put three trays in the freezer, and that was a tight fit. 200 dumplings is a lot and the freezer is pretty damn full now.