Chinese New Year

We had a party for Chinese New year. It was our first party in over ten years and I wanted to cook things that were familiar, though perhaps still rather aggressive.

I decided on pot stickers, Chinese ribs, and spring rolls. At the last second (where a week before is the last second), Josh said he wanted pork buns too. He is crazy.

So I started the steamed bun dough with a plan to make them and freeze them, then resteam during the party. I went with a double recipe, which should have made 100 buns.

I made the dough with high-gluten flour and set it to rise in a warm oven.

Then you cut the dough into smaller sections.

Then you cut the logs into little balls -- 50 from each batch. You cover them with plastic wrap and leave them to rise.

Then you roll them out, using a chopstick dipped in lard to keep the hinge separate. Then they are supposed to rest another 30 minutes but it took so long for me to roll them, that I started steaming them as soon as I was done rolling.

Instead of using the parchment paper bottoms, I used iceberg lettuce leaves to cushion the steamer. There were so many batches that if I left the lettuce in too many times, it started to 1) look ragged and 2) flavor the buns.

The buns came out pretty well.

I put them on drying racks and, when they were completely cool, I put them in freezer bags and into the freezer they went.

Fast forward to the night before the party. We had bought the meat the weekend before and frozen it so I had a list on the microwave door of all the steps I had to take before the party. Josh went to the store on Wednesday so that it would still be pretty fresh for the party.

I got home, ate a quick dinner that Josh brought home, and then started wrapping dumplings. For three hours. The dumpling skins were really bad -- dry around most of the edges. It took a much longer time to wrap and they were messy looking.

For three hours, I wrapped dumplings until I ran out of filling. As I finished groups of 16 or so, I boiled them twice (normally you cook them in three rounds), then put them on the same drying racks to cool.

When the dumplings were cool enough, I laid them as close together as I could to cool. Two huge bags of dumplings went into the fridge and a ton more stayed out on the counter.

The day of the party, I fried them up in oil as usual. They were good. The two bags outlasted the party. I gave one to L+H to thank them for helping with the party. The other, we ate for lunches.

The morning of the party, I cooked the pork belly. Later, during the party, I sliced and heated up the pork, resteamed the buns, and added sliced cucumbers, scallions, and some hoisin.

I also made spring rolls. The first thing I did when I got up -- as I drank my coffee -- was to prep two batches of spring roll filling. The regular one -- pork, shrimp, shitakes, carrots, and cabbage. And one for vegetarians -- pressed tofu, shitakes, carrots, and cabbage. And then I left raw ingredients for Holly, which is gluten-free.

It took seemingly forever to prep all the filling and then start to prep the ribs (which I have no pictures of). I precooked the ribs so they just had to brushed with sauce and caramelized off.

Around the start of the party, L+H showed up and H started rolling spring rolls for me. That was awesome.

The party went well. I ended up cooking the whole time, but Chinese food needs to be served hot, and it didn't seem like work. I hope my guests didn't mind that I wasn't circulating.

We were too tired to have dah been lo for new year so we had it the following weekend. Tasty.