The Dumpling Path

Tonight marked my second dumpling night in exactly a week, but unlike last time (post to come), I had leftover filling this time to "deal with."

I've had this idea in my head to make beef, tomato & egg dumplings for some time now, so after a trip to Flushing for a haircut, I also picked up everything I would need to make an Asian culinary feast.

Since I used store bought dumpling skins, it becomes all about the filling.

It started with some eggs, a hot pan, and oil.

The beginning

And then it took off from there - see below the process in picture collage form:

Starting from the top left, after the eggs were scrambled, I let them sit in the bowl to cool while getting started with the rest of the ingredients.

And by get started, I mean throw the following ingredients into a bowl and mix them all together: ground beef, scallions, raw egg, sesame oil, diced tomatoes, salt & pepper to taste. Add in the scrambled eggs, and we're ready to assemble the dumplings.

Once assembled, steam them in the pan, and voila! Dinner is served - with enough leftover to pack up for tomorrow's lunch! Problem was though (and really, it turned out to be the best kind of problem), I didn't end up using all of the filling with the dumpling skins that I had. Sooooo, I decided to stuff some Asian eggplants that I had also bought.

I chopped up the eggplants into segments so they would be easier to scoop out, rather than struggle trying to keep it all in one piece. Cut those segments in half, and then used a paring knife to take out the meat in the middle. Stuffed the scooped out pieces with the beef filling from the dumplings, and put them in a foil lined pan for baking. Drizzled everything with some sesame oil (my love) and soy sauce. Baked in the oven at 350 degrees for...actually I'm not really sure - maybe about half an hour covered, and then 10 min uncovered.

 

So now one may ask - what did you do with the meat of the eggplant segments??? A simple saute with some of my favorite flavors.

A few of my favorite things

First saute some garlic, scallions & shallots in a mix of vegetable and sesame oils. Your kitchen will smell something amazing. Throw in the eggplant pieces and season with soy sauce and maybe ground pepper to taste. Let everything sizzle for a little bit, then add some water and cover on medium/low heat. Once it starts boiling and most of the water has evaporated, uncover and turn up the heat. Then add some chili oil if you want (I did want), and some green scallions for the finishing touch!

 

To boot, after all of this, I was brought home some awesome grapefruit yogurt bubble tea from Kung Fu Tea! Life is good =)

Steak & Rice

In an effort to improve my ability for cooking meats, and in celebration of my recently acquired electric skillet, I picked up a cut of meat at the market and a head of broccoli and got to work!

I had this amazing broccoli rice at a Brazilian restaurant months ago, and I believe it was mostly finely chopped broccoli, garlic and rice with olive oil. So I sauteed some garlic with chopped broccoli (below) in olive oil before adding the cooked rice.

In the meantime, I had the meat marinating in soy sauce, sesame oil and a little bit of sugar and dried rosemary. Set the skillet to 400 degrees, put the steak on for a few minutes on each side just so it was browned on the outside...

 ...and medium rare on the inside! I erred on the side of being more rare b/c then when reheated for lunch, it wouldn't get too overcooked. One must think ahead about such things!

Green Beans Attempt

I love ordering sauteed green beans in black bean sauce every time I'm at a Chinese restaurant, but for some reason, I've never tried to make the dish myself. But as I was left to my own devices for a few weeks with a bag of Chinese green beans in the fridge that would go bad and inevitably have to be thrown out if I didn't do anything with them, I thought I'd take a stab at cooking it..somehow...

The preparation part of it went well...I think where I went wrong was the sauce. To be quite honest, I Google'd a few recipes for Chinese String Beans, and since I can't really read many of the sauces that we have in our cabinets, I just experimented by throwing in a little bit of...well, I think I ended up throwing in a little bit of everything to try to get a similar flavor. It wasn't until the end that I realized I was missing a key ingredient - the black bean sauce. But I had no idea where that was hidden, so I had to settle with what I had, which ended up being edible, especially paired with some of the microwavable bao zhi (pork buns), that I had stashes of in the freezer, but I'll have to figure out how they really ought to be cooked at some point.

Intimidatingly long beans

chopped

Preparation

Slicing ginger

Into the pot we go...

Cooked

An afterthought...I was missing that kick in the flavor

Final dinner for uno

Dumpling Night

One of many dumpling nights that I've had lately - I actually didn't do any of the cooking other than prepping the sauces (garlic & soy sauce and garlic & vinegar w/ hot sauce), but thanks to Instagram (how did I live without it before???), I have some photos I wanted to share from the meal.

And now that I've successfully made myself hungry again by looking at these pictures again...I'm off to find some food! Perhaps an Ego Waffle with chocolate chips? I think yes...

love love LOVE garlic

 

 

We also had some fish ball (teehee) soup

Pasta Salad

One of my favorite things to throw together for an impromptu BBQ party is this pasta salad. A neighbor gave my mom the recipe back when I was maybe still in Middle School?!?! Definitely not going to get into how many years ago that actually was...*ahem...

All it is, is: penne (I used whole wheat today b/c that's what we had in the house). a cucumber, tomatoes, a red onion, garlic, feta cheese, olive oil, and salt and pepper to taste. Might I add, the cucumber and tomatoes that I used today were from our very own garden =)

Cook the pasta (al dente of course!), chop everything else up, mix it all together, and voila! Meal. Game. Set. Match.

Check out what this bum was doing while she was supposed to be "helping" me