CSA week 12 - Gumbo z'herbes

I'm not entirely certain about this. There are lots of recipes out there but they all agree on simmering the greens two hours or longer. Collards, OK maybe they can handle that. But chard and turnip greens? And what about the dandelion greens? Most of the recipes put them on the list of greens to include but nobody prepares them to deal with the bitterness.

I'm going to try it, but I dunno.

First step, clean and prep 2-3 pounds of greens--whatever you've got, the more variety the better. For those who haven't read the previous post, I had 1 bunch collards, 1 bunch chard, 1 bunch dandelion greens, 1 bunch turnip greens and 1 bunch radish greens. I did this prep the night before to avoid having dinner too very late.

Next step, get a gallon of water and/or stock (I used two cups of shrimp stock and the rest water) to a boil in a large pot and add the greens. Simmer for at least an hour.

Meanwhile,make a roux. I used the in-oven method. Mix equal parts fat and flour (I used 2 Tablespoons bacon drippings, 3 Tablespoons canola oil and 5 Tablespoons flour) in a big cast iron pot and put it in a 350 degree oven for at least an hour. No stirring necessary. The recipes that specify call for a peanut-butter colored roux, but they all also call for filé powder added at the end too. I don't have any filé so I'm not going to get that thickening. And, as you probably know, the darker the roux, the more flavor, but the less thickening power. So I pulled it out of the oven at around 1 hour 20 minutes. It looks peanut butter colored, but it started a little dark from the bacon drippings so I think I'm in good shape.

After that time, the greens have wilted considerably. Here they are along with half a cabbage, 1 bunch scallions and 1 bunch parsley that are going back into the pot with them later.

But before that, the pot with the roux goes up on the stove and in goes 1 large white onion, 1 green bell pepper and 3 stalks celery, chopped. I cooked that for 10 minutes over medium-high heat before adding the reserved stock and greens which I've roughly chopped, the cabbage, scallion and parsley (although what good scallion and parsley added this early will do I dunno), a ham hock, 2 bay leaves, 4 stalks thyme, 1 stalk rosemary, 4 allspice berries and a generous amount pre-mixed Cajun spice blend because I'm lazy.

It's at this point that I finally understand exactly how huge this batch of gumbo is. I'm going to be eating this for a month; it better be good.

Normally, that's the dish. Just simmer an hour more and serve, but I wanted it a little heartier so I added a couple links of andouille sausage and, 5 minutes before the end, a quarter pound of shrimp.

And here it is served over rice:


Hmmm...no real thickening at all. Or roux flavor, either, disappointingly. This is basically a huge mess of greens in a bucket of pot liquor. Lacking the filé powder, maybe I'll make up a slurry and bring it back up to a boil to thicken it up. It'll probably add a little raw flour flavor, but I'll trade that off for making this sauce into gravy. The greens still have a tiny bit of texture to them--the cabbage a little more--but mainly it's just soft. It's not falling apart like I expected though, so it's still in a pleasant neighborhood.

The flavors of the greens have all melded together to just a generic tasty green. No notable bitterness, or skunkiness from the boiled cabbage either. The herbs and spices round out the flavor a little and there's a hint of smokiness there. The sausage and shrimp weren't in long enough to swap flavors with the greens so they've retained all their flavor. The shrimp are a nice match, the sausage a bit less so. That'll probably change as everything melds in the refrigerator over night, though. I'll have some for lunch tomorrow and report back in a comment.

Roasted cabbage with bacon

I had hoped to present a new black sapote recipe for you today (and have a fancy desert for myself), but my sapotes aren't cooperating. One's softened, but the skin isn't browning and flaking the way it's supposed to. Who knows what's going on inside there. The other may as well be a bocce ball for all the ripening its done. I guess the cold snap affected the fruit in my pantry just a badly as it did the ones still on the trees.

Instead, here's how I used up the rest of my cabbage. This is a recipe I saw on TheKitchn.com this morning, and like most of their recipes, it's pretty simple.

Take however much cabbage you've got, slice it into thick wedges, lay them out on a baking rack over a pan, spray with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, strew with bacon lardons (4 thick slices for a full head), and bake at 450 degrees for 30 minutes. I added some sliced onion, but otherwise left it as is.

Here it is just before I flipped the wedges half way through roasting:


And here's the final result served over a plate of potato pierogies with a dollop of sour cream:


For as simple a dish as this is, it's pretty darn good, actually. The cabbage takes on a range of flavors and textures depending on how browned it got, from sweet and juicy to toasty crisp. Not a hint of the off flavors cabbage can have. And it's pretty unusual to have cabbage that isn't wet or greasy. It lets you appreciate it for itself instead of as part of a salad or transformed by pickling.


The bacon, of course, pairs fabulously with the cabbage. The onion is less prominent, but it does add a little extra to the dish. Worth including.

I think I'd slice the cabbage a little thinner next time; the thicker slices are just barely cooked through and the centers didn't see much salt. I'd want the bulk of the cabbage softened a little more if I were going to serve it over pasta, as one might if one were out of pierogies.

But really, I find myself considering ways to elaborate on the dish. Top it with buttered bread crumbs maybe? Anchovies instead of bacon? There are some interesting options here.

CSA week five - Bacalhau a Mineira

Coming off of two relatively dull posts and some extra time away from the blog, I knew I had to come back from my trip with an extra interesting post. That's a particular challenge given the cabbage and plum tomatoes I had to work with. Not the most congenial ingredients for something impressive.

But, I think what I've got here just might fit the bill. Bacalhau a Mineira is a salt cod dish from the Minas Gerais state of Brazil. It's one of those dishes where every village has its own variation and the only proper one is the way your mother made it. I found a recipe in English on recipehound.com that was taken from the Book of Latin American Cooking by Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz, but when I looked for other versions, I had to Babel-fish translate them from Portuguese. I may not be getting everything quite right, but at least I know they're authentic.

Almost every version I found, with the exception of Ms. Ortiz's oddly, was a casserole layered with pre-cooked vegetables, heavy on the potatoes. So, I started with a pot of salted water where I boiled two thickly sliced medium red potatoes until just tender. I removed those and then blanched three plum tomatoes to make them easier to peel. Removed them, lowered the heat and coddled two eggs.

Meanwhile, in a medium cast iron pan, I sautéed sliced onion, garlic and red and green peppers until softened. Then I added about three quarters of a pound of sliced cabbage which I sautéed over rather high heat until nicely wilted. To that I added the tomatoes, peeled and chopped, and a half cup of white wine. I reduced the heat, cooked until the tomatoes started to fall apart and then removed all of that to a bowl, leaving the accumulated juices in the pan.

Into those juices went three quarters of a pound of salt cod that I had soaked overnight in a few changes of water to desalinify (so why I didn't just use fresh cod, I dunno). I cooked the cod until it started getting fragrant and flaky and then removed it to another bowl.

Now it was time to start building the casserole. Since the pan was oven safe I just used it instead of a baking dish. First a layer of the cabbage mixture, then some potato slices, then some cod, sprinkled with parsley, green and black olives and, god help us all, raisins. I repeated that two more times, each layer well-lubricated with olive oil.

On top I nestled in my halved beautifully mollet-cooked and then topped with shredded queijo Minas. At least that's what the recipe called for. I asked for a substitute at Whole Foods, but the cheese expert (from Brazil fortunately enough) got called away and a couple yahoos attempted to help. I ended up with a queso blanco that was a) a bit too salty and b) didn't melt the way queijo Minas is supposed to. Ah well.

But I only learned that latter part after 30 minutes in a 350 degree oven.

And here's the result:


That pile really ought to be at least partially held together with melted cheese. One recipe I saw shredded the potatoes and mixed it and shredded cheese in with the other ingredients. Maybe I should have done that.


Hmm...this is an interesting combination of flavors. I wouldn't have thought raisins and cod would work, but they do. It's not really melding though. It's a lot of individual elements that aren't actively clashing, but not building to anything either. Maybe the cheese is supposed to hold it together more than just physically. Now that it's cooled a bit, the cabbage, potato and cod flavors are working well together, the earthy melange punctuated by the bright saltiness of the olives emphasizing the cod and raisins bringing out the cabbage's sweetness. The tomatoes don't do much, but these aren't the world's most flavorful tomatoes. Still, I think I'm starting to get how it's supposed to work and I think I can say I actually like this now. Good thing since I've got about five meal's worth left over.

A meatloaf experiment

I did a good bit of cooking this weekend, but nothing much worth posting about. I made a pot of chicken stock, a mess of beans, a batch of scallion buns (I took out the bacon and chives that messed up the last batch and instead just added a little cabbage. That worked very nicely.) and, as you can see from the post title, a meatloaf.

I hadn't planned on the meatloaf being particularly interesting either, but I had a thought that brings it just barely into range. If you read my last post you know that's a pretty low bar, but the results promise possibilities to come.

So, meatloaf. In my last post about meatloaf included a schema that I stole from somewhere for a generic meatloaf. Here's a bit more detailed version:
2 pounds ground meat
1 1/2 cups finely chopped starch (but not too finely. Breadcrumbs, not flour)
1 cup somewhat more coarsely chopped vegetables
2-3 eggs
1/4 - 1/2 cup dairy of some sort
copious seasonings

mix everything, pack it into a loaf pan and decant it into a baking dish. Bake at 350 degrees for around an hour until the inside reaches between 140 and 160 degrees depending on who you ask. If you're going to glaze, wait until the last 10 minutes.


Now you could fuss about making sure your choice of vegetable matches nicely with your choice of meat and starch, or you can throw together whatever you've got and count on the seasoning to smooth things out. I went the latter route this time around.

The actual experiment was how far I pushed the definition of "starch". Usually, that means bread crumbs or sometimes oatmeal or crushed croutons. Instead I, while looking at the remnants of the chicken stock cooking process, wondered if mashed carrots and turnips might do. (I also had a good bit of well-boiled chicken. I put that in the beans.) I thought I'd have the full cup and half, but after sqeezing the soup out of the vegetables, they had compressed down to only half a cup, and that's including the bits of onion I left in the there. On the plus side, it had the texture of squished white bread which a lot of meatloaf recipes use. I filled out the rest of the volume with half panko bread crumbs and half oatmeal. (My homemade breadcrumbs went grotty with all the humidity recently so I had to toss them out and make due with what I had left in the house.) I ground those together with the carrot/turnip mush and ended up with this promisingly mealy-looking stuff:


For the meat, I used a pound of ground beef, half a pound of pork and a few Argentinean-style chorizos. I usually buy the Venezuelan-style ones, but I thought I'd try Argentinean this week. I dunno, though. They smell like cheap hot dogs and they're full of fat and gristle.


For the vegetables, I used cabbage, red and yellow sweet peppers, some past-their-prime cremini mushrooms and carrot tops. I fried them up to add a bit of flavor from browning and to drive out some moisture so they can absorb meat juices later.

For the dairy, I used about a third of a cup of well-crumbled goat cheese and the whey it came packed in.

And for the seasoning, adobo con sazon, Pickapeppa sauce and Crystal hot sauce.

Here it is all mixed and molded.




And here it is afterward. I did a simple glaze of ketchup, brown sugar, hot sauce and white vinegar.





It holds together nicely without being tough or crumbly. I should have chopped the vegetables more finely and there's some sinewy bits from the sausage, but otherwise, the texture's very nice.



The flavor is a bit more carroty than perhaps one might wish and I went light on the salt, but otherwise, the random assortment of ingredients I threw together work well enough. It's not great, but random assortments rarely are. [It's tomorrow now and I can report that the flavors work rather better cold and I've decided that I quite like the textural interest of the vegetable chunks. So I'm happier with the results than I was yesterday.] The interesting bit is that the soup vegetables have vanished entirely into the meat mix and I do think they had a beneficial effect on both texture and, subtly, on the flavor.

I wonder how other vegetables with a similar texture might work. Mashed potato or yam should be comparable. I'd be surprised if there aren't recipes out there that already use them, but it's tough to search for them as they're often mentioned as side dishes where they're not ingredients. Going further afield, might an avocado, with much of the moisture squeezed out, work? Or a roasted canistel? Canistels firm up to a yam-like texture when roasted. Now I'm thinking about roasted avocados. There are a bunch of recipes out there, but they're really just warming the avocados through and melting cheese on top. What does happen to avocados when you roast them long enough to affect the texture? Have any of you tried?

CSA week 20 - Glazed turnips, cabbage and kielbasa

As I mentioned a while back, I wanted to try a variation on the very successful and rather odd glazed turnip recipe I made a while back. I was just going to mess with the seasonings a little, but since I've got half a cabbage and a little sausage that might do well in this inverse braise why not try it all together?

It's the same simple procedure: slice a turnip into wedges, add them to a cold pan, dot with butter and add water to halfway up. Bring to a boil on high, turn heat down to medium, boil away the water stirring infrequently (about 20 minutes, when the pan's dry turn the heat back up and cook five minutes more until the turnips are tender and browned.

This time I added the sausage when the water came to a boil and laid the cabbage over top for it to steam. I tried to keep it elevated after stirring with some success, but just mixed everything up for the final sauté. That caused a small problem as the cabbage stuck to the cast iron pan and burnt a little. I should have used non-stick.

I decided not to do a full vinegrette since that would have been weird with the sausage. Instead I just seasoned with a little mustard seed, a little caraway seed, salt and pepper and drizzled a little cider vinegar over top when it was done. I would have deglazed the pan with it if it wasn't for the burnt bits.


The turnip didn't turn out quite as well as last time. They could have used a little more time in the pan when the cabbage was ready to come out. Also, this turnip was a bit past its prime so its texture was sub-par before I started. Given all that, it turned out fine. The cabbage worked out better--tender, lightly browned (the overbrowned bits stayed in the pan) and flavorful. And the keilbalsa was well cooked and had a bit of browning too.

So, a good one pot meal. I just need to cook the turnips a little longer before adding everything else.

And that does it for the CSA season bar some leftover celery that I've got a plan for and a pile of potatoes that I don't. The first a la carte CSA offering is this weekend but you have to pick it up down at the farm and I really don't like driving in Miami even on Saturdays so I passed this time around. I think I'm happier with how it went this time around than last year. I threw out less lettuce for one thing and I think the dishes I made were, on average, both tastier and more interesting. I have the CSA to thank for my increased blog readership certainly, although given the number of people in the CSA I thought I'd have more than a few dozen regular readers. I guess most folks know what they're doing and don't need my ideas. I wonder if a message board would get more traffic? I also wonder how many folks will stick around as I switch from CSA-driven posting to working through the recipe to-do list I've accumulated. Time will tell.

CSA week 19 - Pizzoccheri

Pizzoccheri is both the name of this dish and the buckwheat noodles that make it so unusual and interesting. I've only ever seen buckwheat noodles before as Japanese soba noodles. These come from Valtellina in northern Italy. This casserole seems to be the only thing that gets done with them.

There are quite a few versions of this recipe on the web. I picked one that made a reasonably small amount for my first try, but beyond that convenience and some small variation in the ratios, they're all pretty much the same.

I could have substituted in soba and saved myself a bit of trouble, but I decided to make the pizzoccheri noodles from scratch. I need the practice.
I used:
1 cup buckwheat flour
3/4 cup semolina flour
2 large eggs [some recipes just use water]
a pinch of salt,

mixed them all together in the usual way, kneaded for a good ten minutes to compensate for the lack of gluten in the buckwheat, let it rest and then clogged up my pasta machine with the soft, sticky, friable, unworkable dough. That clearly wasn't going to work so I rolled it out by hand as best I could and then cut out broad, short noodles.

I let them dry a little as I brought a pot of water up to a boil.

Meanwhile, I fried 2 ounces of chopped pancetta in a small pan. This is an unusual addition to a simple peasant dish, but since I'm not actually a peasant I figured I could splurge a little. Once they were crisp, I fished them out and set them aside. Then I added a modest 3 Tablespoons of butter to the pan [I saw recipes that used a whole stick], melted that down, added a smashed clove of garlic and 4 julienned sage leaves and simmered on low for a couple minutes to infuse the flavors. No browning.

By this time, the water had come to a boil so I added the noodles. Because they were so thick, they took a good 15 minutes to cook through. I fished them out and kept them warm. Then I added six ounces of shredded cabbage [some recipes use chard] and a large potato, thinly sliced and boiled them for ten minutes until they were tender. A lot of recipes start with the vegetables, cook a little while and then add the noodles to the pot, but I had no idea how long my noodles were going to take so this way seemed best.

And finally, I shredded 4 ounces of fontina cheese and 2 ounces of Parmesan. Again, many recipes use a lot more.

Once everything was cooked, I got out a big bowl, put some noodles in the bottom, added a layer of vegetables then a layer of cheese and repeated until I had three full layers. The pancetta goes on top and then the sage butter. A few recipes added a couple cups of bread crumbs before the butter and then baked the whole thing like a lasagna, but I kept it simple; the hot ingredients were plenty to melt the fontina to bring the dish together.


And the result is...not all I had hoped, honestly. Thinner noodles would have helped; Right now there's not much textural contrast between the noodles and the potatoes. And both are on the bland side. Pair those with boiled cabbage and mild cheese and you've got a big hearty bowl of kind of boring. It's not really bad, it just clearly could be better. Double the sage, quadruple the garlic, add some hot pepper flakes, sauté the cabbage to condense the flavor (instead of boiling it away. There's a lot of flavor in the boiling water that should be in the dish.), crisp up the potatoes, switch out the fontina for something with a bit more punch and then I think you've got something. Or maybe just more salt in the pasta water and heap up the cheese and butter. I think I was too conservative and missed the point of the dish.

I've been doing a bit more reading and thinking about buckwheat pancakes I've had. People are saying, and I'm thinking, that buckwheat by itself doesn't taste so good. The flavor you're looking for is the combination of buckwheat and butter. I've got a couple servings of leftovers and I'm adding a sizable chunk of butter to both before they go into the freezer. Also, a sprinkling of pine nuts for a bit of texture. I think that should do the trick.

CSA week 11 - Thai braised cabbage

I said yesterday that I wanted to add fish sauce to the New Irish braised cabbage so today I did. I wanted to make it a proper main dish so there was actually a bit more to it than that.

I started by steaming a couple of Chinese sausages and marinating four extra large shrimp in a mixture of fish sauce, lime juice, sambal oelek and cilantro. Normally, I'd add ginger and sugar but those are all already there in the cabbage so I left them out.

Once the sausage was cooked (about 15 minutes), I sliced them up along with a red hot pepper, a bit of shallot I had left over, a couple cloves of garlic and some more cilantro.

I heated up some oil in a wok, added the pepper and shallot, stir fried until they turned fragrant and added the sausage. That got a minute before I added the shrimp, holding back the marinade. That got another minute before I added most of the cabbage (about half of what I made yesterday), the marinade and a bit more fish sauce.

That I cooked for a couple minutes longer trying to boil away all that liquid. I didn't quite manage it, but I did cook it down quite a bit. I finished it off with the rest of the cilantro and some ground roasted peanuts. If I was smart I would have held those off to garnish each serving so I could get a beauty shot, but I mixed them in while it was all still in the wok instead. Ah well.

Not the prettiest of dishes, but I think it turned out well. I didn't measure the fish sauce so I got a bit lucky that I did successfully manage to balance the ginger and the sweetness of the browned cabbage without overwhelming either. That new more whole combination acts as the background with the bits of chili, shrimp and sausage to the fore in different amounts in each bite. So there are a variety of interesting flavors and textures going on, but the cabbage and ginger aren't lost at all just now they're part of the team instead of just sitting out there on their own.

I'm starting to make a habit out of salvaging screwed up recipes. I'm going to have to create a tag for that.

CSA week 11 - Braised cabbage and turnips Anna Livia

I'm making two side dishes from The New Irish Table today. No main dish as I'm making plenty of both. That's despite the fact that both would clearly go well with pork. Maybe with the leftovers.

I'm making these by the book so I'll just give you the recipes straight:

Braised cabbage

Ingredients:
2 Tablespoon sunflower oil [I'm pretty sure high-smoke-point cooking oil is the point here and any will do.]
4 shallots, finely diced
1 head savoy or napa cabbage [or whatever we've got], shredded
1 teaspoon prepared horseradish
1 clove garlic, minced
1 Tablespoon grated fresh ginger
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 Tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice
salt and pepper to taste

In a heavy saucepan, heat the sunflower oil over medium-high heat. Add the shallots, cabbage, horseradish, garlic, and ginger and sauté for 5 to 8 minutes, or until the cabbage starts to wilt.

Stir in the sugar and cook to caramelize the cabbage lightly.

Add the vinegar and lemon juice and stir to scrape up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Season with salt and pepper. Serve immediately.


Turnips Anna Livia

Ingredients:
6 Tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup (2 ounces) grated Dubliner or white Cheddar cheese
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 teaspoon minced fresh thyme, plus more for garnish
1/4 teaspoon minced fresh rosemary
pinch of ground nutmeg [which I forgot]
1 1/2 to 2 pounds white turnips, peeled and finely sliced [I only had 1 1/4 pounds of turnips so I added one potato. Also I don't have all day so I didn't bother peeling them.]
6 slices bacon, cooked and crumbled [I presume they'd say Irish bacon if they meant that. And Irish bacon doesn't crumble well, does it?]
1/4 cup heavy cream

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Brush the bottom and sides of a 9-inch pie plate with some of the melted butter.

In a small bowl, combine the flour, cheese, salt, pepper, thyme, rosemary and nutmeg.

Arrange a single layer of the largest turnip slices in a concentric circle in the bottom and up the sides of the plate. [I don't think I'm doing it quite right.] Sprinkle some of the flour mixture and some of the bacon over the turnips. Drizzle with butter. Repeat, layering, ending with a layer of turnips. Pour cream over top.


Place the plate on a baking sheet. Spray a 9-inch square of aluminum foil with butter-flavored cooking spray [who has that? I rubbed the foil with a knob of butter.] and place, butter-side down on top of the turnips.


Place a heavy 8- or 9-inch cast-iron skillet or pie plate on top and press firmly. Fill the pan with pie weights or dried beans [or, as I did, pile more cast iron on top] and bake for 40 to 45 minutes or until the bottom and sides are golden brown. (Check after 35 minutes and, if not browning, remove the foil and continue baking until the top is golden brown.) [That's two different indications of doneness. The sides did appear to be browning a little at 35 minutes, but not the top. I wanted a brown top so I removed the foil and kept baking.] [I got a good bit of smoke and some not so pleasant odors while this was cooking, but I think that's just my cast iron pans seasoning. I oil them and heat them on the stovetop after using them, but it's not the same. This experience will be good for them.]


Remove from the oven. With a spatula, loosen the cake around the edges. Let cool for 5 minutes, then invert onto a serving plate [Some small sticking problems there.] and cut into wedges. Garnish with minced thyme and serve.




The cabbage is nice enough, but it tastes of candied ginger. I like candied ginger, sure, but browned cabbage is good on its own and that ought to be more central than the ginger. I didn't even use a full Tablespoon of it and it's dominating the dish.

The turnips are pretty good too. Not quite soft like Potatoes Anna would be. A bit chewier and with a hints of turnip character standing up against all that butter, bacon and cream. The crispy golden brown outer slices are, of course, the highlight, but it's mildly tasty and hearty throughout.

That ginger is still bugging me, though. I want to add some fish sauce to balance out the spicy sweetness. What with this and Todd English's wacky caponata I'm drawing my line right here. Adding ginger to most European dishes is a fusion too far and I will not stand for it. OK, I'm not going to campaign against it or anything, but I'm leaving it out next time.

CSA week five - potstickers, part 2

I stopped by Lucky Oriental Mart on the way home from work today and picked up some dumpling wrappers to substitute for my failed attempt last night. There were four choices: square vs. round and egg vs. eggless (and also, eggless with yellow die #2 so it looks like it has eggs in it). With egg was labeled Hong Kong-style and eggless Shanghai-style. I was tempted to go for Hong Kong as that's the home of dim sum, but I wanted to reproduce what I tried to make so round, eggless it was to be.

Once I had the package defrosted it was time to stuff. I didn't ruin any even from the start but it did take some time to find a method that worked really well.

I understand that fresh dough would stick closed on its own, but this dough I had to wet around the edges. I kept a little bowl of water and would dip a couple fingers and run them around the circumference. I tried a brush (as I had to redip a couple times to make it all the way around), but that spread too much water and made the dough mushy. So fingers it was to be which slowed the process down considerably.

For each dumpling I scooped out about a Tablespoon of filling using a coffee scoop and dislodged it onto the wrapper using a teaspoon so I didn't get it all over my fingers. After a bit I realized I needed to put the filling in the top half of the wrapper and press it down a little to spread it out. Then I could fold the bottom half up and seal it at one spot at the top. Once the wrapper was held in place I'd seal up which ever side had the filling closer to the edge first, pushing it in to even things out, and then the other side ending not quite at the bottom so I could squeeze out any excess filling as if it was a little pastry bag.

Once I had it sealed up I had to make sure it stayed closed so I pleated the edges starting from the top and then a couple times down each side ending with a folded in corner if I had enough spare dough to do it. It's a two hand process so I'm afraid I didn't get any pictures of the process; sorry. Try YouTube; there are video tutorials that are better than anything I could have done.

It's not tricky after you get the hang of it--kind of meditative, really--and my end results look about right, I think. Pretty time consuming, though. I filled up 38 dumplings total which is not a whole lot for the amount of filling I had. They do seem a little plumper than most I've seen. But then I'm not selling them by the dozen so it doesn't pay me to skimp.

I put most of them onto a sheet of freezer paper on a baking sheet so they can freeze individually before I pack them away. I made sure to press them down a little bit to give them flat bottoms so they'll sit up in the pan later.

But several I kept aside for dinner. You can steam them, boil them in soup, deep fry them, but I wanted to do use the real potsticker method. So I lighted oiled a non-stick pan (If you do this right, non-stick isn't necessary. That's how this method developed and how they got the name. The dumplings stick at first and then unstick themselves.), laid in the dumplings and then added enough water to come about halfway up their sides. Optionally, you can use chicken stock, but I wanted to see how my dumplings held up on their own first.

Then I just covered the pan, with the cover slightly askew to let steam escape, turned the heat to medium high and waited for the water to completely evaporate. When the water's gone; they're done. I gave them an extra minute since, as you can see, they bloated monstrously and I wanted to be sure they were cooked all the way through. That was a mistake, though, and I ended up overcooking the flavor out of them. When cooking them from frozen, you need that extra minute and this is the first time I've cooked fresh. I'll know better next time.

I am pleased that, despite the bloat, none of them burst (at least until I picked them up. They didn't stick to the pan, but they did stick to each other). Partially that's thanks to the store-bought, machine-manufactured wrappings, but my seals stayed sealed so there's that. They're nicely crisp on the bottom and soft and chewy on top as potstickers should be. And, even overcooked, they made fine meaty dipping sauce delivery tools. I made the traditional sauce: soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, a bit of ginger, a bit of scallion and a bit of sesame oil. I like chiu chow chili oil thinned with a little soy, too.

You know, the pre-made wrappers were just fine and they only cost around $2.29 and I have trouble imagining my homemade would be any better even if I made them perfectly. I'm choosing to be O.K. with not successfully making my own.

Before I sign off here, I'd like to mention that, in a remarkable synchronicity, La Diva of http://ladivacucina.blogspot.com is making gow gee, just about the same dumpling but steamed instead of potstuck. Check out her post about it here.

CSA week six - Potstickers, part 1

Usually I put the non-English name in the subject line to foster a little suspense before you click through and find out what I'm talking about. Not this time, though. Potstickers are both a Japanese (gyoza) and Chinese (jiaozi) thing and my standard method of cobbling together recipe from a bunch of different ones gave me something with elements of both.

The "part 1" is because I decided to make my own wrappers and had some difficulty. It sounds easy enough: mix two cups flour with one cup boiling water (The hot water improves the dough's ductility.), knead briefly, roll out in the pasta machine that's been sitting in the back of a cabinet unused for the last five years and cut into 3" diameter circles. But that two to one flour/water ratio gave me an intractably sticky dough no matter how much more flour I added and now my pasta machine is all gunked up and it looks like it's going to be a pain in the butt to clean.

I should have known better, really. Using a new gadget never works right the first time out and that's just when a dough will decide to defy all laws of culinary science and do whatever it wants. Fine, I need to go to the Asian grocery to restock on ramen anyway; I'll pick up some ready-made gyoza wrappers (or wonton wrapper at least) and finish this up tomorrow.

But for now there's still the filling which turned out fine. I used:

3 cups cabbage, finely chopped
6 garlic chives, finely chopped
2 teaspoons ginger, minced
4 garlic cloves, minced

1/2 pound shrimp
1 pound pork
6 small dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked
3 Tablespoons light soy sauce
2 Tablespoons dry rice wine
1 Tablespoon sesame oil
1 large egg
salt and pepper to taste

I sprinkled the cabbage with salt and let it sit for 20 minutes to purge a bit of water. Otherwise the dumplings get soggy I understand. But I used too much salt and had to rinse it off so it may have added all of the water back in. But it looked like substantially less volume after I wrung it out, so maybe not.

Everything but the vegetables went into the food processor and got processed to a fairly smooth paste. Then I folded in the vegetables and put it into the refrigerator to firm up and be easier to work with.

One of the recipes I found suggested boiling a spoonful of the mix to check for seasoning before starting the wrapping. Pretty good idea; the wrapper dough has no salt so it's easy to underestimate the seasoning the filling requires. I ended up adding more salt, pepper and sesame oil and I'm still not sure I'm entirely happy with it.

So, that stays in the fridge until tomorrow. The dough I'm saving too--it may not want to be noodles, but maybe it'll make a decent loaf of bread. Right now, I have to order a pizza.