Pork and Leek Gyozas

It’s been a while since I’ve waxed poetic (at least here) about how much I love dumplings. When I really get going, I have been known to declare that dumplings are the snacks of the gods, are so awesome that nearly every culture has developed some version of them and quite possibly, the food item that will eventually bring about world peace. But I will spare you.

Finding that suddenly I have much more free time than I have in the past months, I decided it was time to stock up the freezer with a menagerie of dumplings again. This time, I restricted myself to only two varieties: a trusty pork and ginger filling from Ming Tsai and a new-to-me pork and leek filling from a recent cookbook acquisition, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s gorgeous Beyond the Great Wall. I ended up modifying their dumpling recipe slightly by adding an egg to the filling to help it bind better and by scaling up, since I always make dumplings in big batches for freezing.

Now that I own two of their books, I can officially say that I love this couple of cookbook authors. Their books are more like travel diaries interspersed with recipes and with plenty of beautiful photography, which happen to be three things I love…well, in addition to dumplings, of course.

 

Sausage and Potato Flatbread

In order to get my sister and I to finish every single grain of rice in our bowls, my grandmother used to tell us that leaving rice grains would mean our future husbands would be ugly. “What do you mean ‘ugly’, grandma?” we asked. “Lots of pockmarks. Or freckles. Or both!” exclaimed my grandmother.

Unfortunately for my grandmother, marrying yucky boys was the last thing on our minds. So she quickly revised her strategy: not finishing all your rice would mean we would grow up with lots of freckles! Yikes! From then on, not one grain of rice was seen in anyone’s rice bowl. Funny thing is, little did she know that we would one day grow up and live in a country where people actually think freckles are cute!

(I hope I’m not giving anyone the impression that my grandmother was cruel because she was the sweetest and kindest woman. She just had a funny strategy of asking us to finish our dinner.)

Thanks to my grandmother’s efforts, the philosophy of not wasting food is now permanently etched in my brain. So, what does that have to do with flatbread? If you’ll remember (from what seems like ages ago), the creation of a certain sourdough starter (admit it, you thought I killed it already, didn’t you!) and its continual maintenance (ha! but I didn’t!) generate enough leftover starter that I can feel the onset of freckles just from thinking about dumping it in the trash.

What to do … what to do? Thanks to a recipe from breadtopia, slight modifications, and an expectation of something more like flatbread than a fluffy pizza, not one grain(?) of wheat will go to waste!

 

Vietnamese Summer Rolls

I’ve been making these Vietnamese summer rolls (or spring rolls, whichever you prefer) a lot lately. I first had a craving for them on a particularly hot day since it requires minimal stove time and makes for a refreshing light dinner. Besides, Nathan had bought a bag of frozen shrimps for a Thai curry or something, so I saw it as my duty to help clean out the freezer.

Then just last week, my lab was treated to a celebration dinner at Incanto, one of my favorite restaurants in the city, where we got to partake in a Whole Beast Feast. The whole beast in question was an 85 lb piggie and needless to say, it was both delicious and unforgettable. But as it turned out, our lab eyes were way bigger than our lab stomachs, leaving us with box after box of leftover roast pork. Vietnamese spring rolls come to the rescue again, as I substituted shredded roast pork for shrimp.

Finally, just today while looking for a snack during housecleaning, I stared into a fridge that I’m trying to clear out before our Boston trip next week. I spotted a random piece of fried tofu left over from a round of sandwich making, and that became Vietnamese summer rolls round #3.

Before I forget, thank you to my former roomie Kim for teaching me how to make these!

 

Sweet Potato and Leek Latkes

Happy Hanukkah, everyone!

Ok, ok, so I didn’t actually know that Hanukkah has already started until my friend Noah told me about it yesterday. Being non-Jewish, I feel like maybe it’s ok. But then again, I do have a lot of Jewish friends, so you would think I would pay attention to stuff like that. I guess I’m just a terrible friend.

To make up for my ignorance, I tried my hands at making latkes. I have to preface this by admitting that I wasn’t too hopeful since I’ve attempted latkes twice before and both times, they ended up as soggy messes that failed to hold together. But I refuse to let latkes defeat me! So in Battle of Latkes III: The Reckoning, I decided to cheat just a little and use sweet potatoes instead of regular potatoes.

Not only did a semi-sweet latke sounded lovely to me, but sweet potatoes are also much drier than regular potatoes, so I might be saved from the cursed sogginess. Since they are drier than regular potatoes, though, I actually had to throw an extra egg into the mix to get the latkes to bind. I also threw in a little bit of cornstarch as extra binding insurance in addition to the flour that’s usually in latke recipes. Finally, I up-ed the cooking time since sweet potatoes require slightly longer to cook through.

The result, as you can see above, was not too bad and definitely my best and proudest attempt to date. I might even go so far as to say I’ve defeated the latke this time around: Angi 1/Latkes 2. The latkes held up relatively well and tasted quite yummy, especially with a horseradish yogurt I whipped up last minute. Basically, we had some yogurt in the fridge and some horseradish leftover from a Bloody-Marys morning long ago. Also, I was too cheap to splurge on creme fraiche or even a tub of sour cream that I’m only going to use a little bit of (welcome to the life of a grad student!). I still think I have some playing around to do in order to get the latkes to be crispy without being too burnt, but perhaps that battle can be saved for next Hanukkah.

 

Umeshiso Maki

For a while now, every time I would open the freezer, there would be a few tubs of this pork broth I made a few months ago, taunting me to find a use for them. Honestly, I can’t even remember exactly why I had pork bones to make broth from – I guess we took the meat off for some other use? Anyway, what can you do with pork broth? I toyed around with the idea for a pork pho for a bit, but having never made regular beef pho before, I was hesitant to attempt my first pho with an alternate meat. Then, in a moment of revelation, I finally figured out where in the noodle world pork broth fits… Ramen! (duh)

Although my broth was also made from pork bones, it was much lighter and clearer than my favorite milky-white tonkotsu broth. I heated it up with the white parts of some scallions, ladled it on top of some fresh ramen, and garnished with the green parts of scallions plus a hard-boiled egg (from Devil’s Gulch Ranch – I’m currently obsessed with finding really good farm eggs). Speaking of ramen, why won’t Japanese stores sell just fresh ramen without seasoning packets?!

To go with the simplistic bowls of noodles, I made some umeshiso maki. Mine all came out pretty sad-looking with rips and tears in places, but as my mom likes to say, “It all ends up looking the same in your stomach anyway.”