Chinese New Year Dinner - Tapas Style

I covered the dumplings I made in the previous post, but I didn't highlight any of the other food we ate for New Year's dinner. When I told my sister that we would be having a bunch of dishes but small portions of each, I said we would be having dinner, tapas style. She replied that it meant we would have a lot of random crap for dinner. I said it was fusion cuisine.

Fusion cuisine or not, the food turned out to be really good. My favorite was the bok choy. I was craving green vegetables after being stuck at school all week; weekends are my time to go home and eat my leafy green veggies. The bok choy was boiled and then simply dressed with some oyster sauce and sesame oil - so good and easy. If I had more vegetables, I would make them in this style.

My second favorite dish was the fried rice. It had lap cheong, or Chinese sausage, in it, and I love fried rice with Chinese sausage. Chinese sausage just adds such flavor to fried rice, or any dish for that matter. If you can eat pork, and you can stomach an ingredient list that reads like a liposuction checklist (pork back fat, pork fat....), then I would get a package of Chinese sausage from an Asian grocery store posthaste. It's really easy to cook, and so versatile. But perhaps that's a different post.

The fish came out better than I thought it would. I tried my best to follow this recipe, but I was lacking a lot of things. The two ingredients I was most irritated about not having were the green onions and the shaoxing rice wine. Last semester, I grew green onions on my windowsill so I could always have them, but after I forgot to change the water a couple of times, some funky stuff grew alongside the green onions and I ended up throwing them away. I was going to buy some green onions at a pre-storm shopping trip, but for whatever reason, I decided against it, leaving me green onion-less for New Year's dinner. I've also been meaning to take some rice wine from my house so I don't have to buy an entire bottle to keep at school, but I also didn't do that before being trapped in my apartment. I know dry sherry is the traditionally recommended shaoxing substitute, but I don't have dry sherry. Google told me that a dry white wine or sake could be substituted, and I fortunately have some sake that no one wants to drink.

I actually enjoyed steaming process. I used my MacGyver skills in the kitchen to rig up a steam setup (actually, I just remembered a tip from David Chang's Momofuku book about elevating dishes out of water).

 
The plate with the fish went on the foil donut, and a lid went over the plate. I say "the lid went over the plate" and not "the lid went on the wok" because the wok doesn't have a lid. We took a big pot lid and put it over the plate, trying not to touch the fish. The fish was steamed until done, the ginger was discarded and new ginger added, hot oil was poured over the ginger and fish, and a soy sauce/sake/brown sugar sauce was cooked and poured over the oily fish. Except, the hot oil poured over the fish wasn't hot enough to crisp anything or heat the ginger, so I ended up pouring the soy mixture over the fish, deciding I was unhappy with the dish, pouring all the liquids back together in the wok to heat up, and trying again. It came out tasting okay. Not restaurant-quality, but it wasn't bad.

The instant udon was nothing special. I really love instant udon, so it was awesome for me, but it wasn't anything I would bring out for special occasions. I just followed package directions and cooked it.

All-in-all, we had a lot of food to eat, an excellent way to celebrate the Year of the Rabbit!

And, of course, we had oranges and tangerines for dessert. I cut the oranges into their own serving bowl at my sister's request.

As a digression, I would just like to say that I could not have cooked this dinner without all the stuff I've accumulated in my kitchen. Lack of rice wine aside, I had enough sauces, spices, and other consumable goods to actually make dinner good. If you are ever about to be trapped in a snowstorm, I would say, in all seriousness, buy a lot of shit. Cooking is a lot easier to improvise if you have a lot of materials to work with. Especially sesame oil and Chinese sausage. That stuff makes anything taste and smell delicious.   

Pink Bunny eating orange fruits and drinking orange drink.

Chinese New Year Dinner - Dumplings

With all the snow that hit the Midwest, I've had more time and reasons to cook. Instead of visiting the school cafeteria, Taco Bell, or just going home for meals, I've actually had to fend for myself and cook. This was exciting, until I realized Chinese New Year was on Thursday. And I had virtually no access to a regular grocery store, let alone the Asian grocery store. (I have friends who trekked through the snow to the nearest store to buy food, but I'm not that hardy. I've inherited a lot of Campbell's soup from a roommate; if I ever finish all of it and still can't drive to the store, I will probably die in my apartment.) I had to whip up a Chinese New Year's dinner with only things in my kitchen.

Fortunately, there was one fish filet in my freezer - I could still have the traditional fish dish, even if there was only one piece. I had some leftover rice, so I could make some fried rice. My mother insisted on giving my a bag of vegetables before I left for school at the beginning of the week because she was worried that the impending snow storm was going to cut off all of my food lines. While that was a bit of overkill (the school cafeteria remained open), I had some fresh bok choy for a Chinese dinner. My mother also gave me some instant udon noodles. While not ideal for a Chinese New Year noodle dish, I figured it was ethnically closer than the spaghetti noodles I had - noodle dish solved. Later, I remembered I had a box of instant teriyaki-flavored noodles in my cabinet, but that can be dinner for another night. Teriyaki chicken served over a bed of teriyaki noodles, anyone?!

The final coup de grace involved making dumplings from scratch. I had no ground pork or Napa cabbage, the usual fillings I eat in my dumplings. Instead, I had a chicken breast and the bok choy. I didn't have any dumpling wrappers, but, fortunately, wrappers made from scratch only require flour and water. I relied heavily on this recipe from my favorite food blog to make the dough. I halved the recipe, only to make another half batch to finish wrapping the filling. I wasn't able to roll the dumping dough as thin as I needed it to be, so I ended up with less than 56 wrappers. I partially blame by poor gluten-handling skills, but I also apportion blame on the fact that I don't have a rolling pin at my apartment and had to use this:

My Nalgene bottle

 and

Another water bottle.

I definitely think the wrappers could have been thinner, especially after they were boiled. Some of the thicker-walled dumplings had a starchy, sticky kind of mouthfeel after they were boiled.

Even though the rolling part was kind of suspect, we ended up with filled dumplings.

Note the wonton interloper on the tray. And how only one of them is pleated correctly.

The filling for the dumplings came out surprisingly well, especially for something that was thrown together from only on-hand things.

Keeping everything small for easy filling.

Snowed-In Chinese New Year Dumplings
Served 3, with other food, plus leftovers. So maybe 4-ish?

• 1 chicken breast, diced into small pieces
• Bok choy stems, diced (I used enough to equal the volume of the chicken breast.)
• Ginger root, diced (I ended up with about a teaspoon or so of ginger. Most of the ginger was going to the fish)
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• Dumpling wrappers, as needed

Combine everything except the wrappers. Mix until all the liquids are evenly dispersed. You'll know when this is.
I used a small spoon to dump the filling onto the wrappers, which ended up being around 1.5 teaspoons of filling per dumpling. But use your best judgment; if you managed to roll your wrappers thinner and larger, use more. Or maybe you like a high wrapper to filling ratio; use less. Keep filling until the chicken mixture is gone.
Depending on the kind of wrapper you used, the closure method will differ. In my experience, store-bought wrappers need a little liquid to help them seal, but for the homemade wrappers I had, I just pinched them shut without additional liquid. Try pinching the wrappers shut. If they don't stay shut, use a little water or cornstarch slurry to seal them.
Once the dumplings are sealed, boil or steam them to cook. I boiled these by dumping them in a pot of boiling water. Once they float to the top, I let them cook for a minute or two more, and then I take them out. I also fried some of them after they had boiled.

Boiled only.

Fried afterward in a wok with some oil.

We served these with soy sauce and sesame oil - yum!