Polly also showed me how to make Jiaozi (Chinese Dumpling) when she came over to make the salted mustard with pork belly dish. Polly learned how to make Jiaozi from Xiao Qin who came from Taiwan.

Jiaozi is a Chinese dumpling which consists of minced meat and chopped vegetables wrapped into a piece of thin dough. The more popular meat filings are ground pork, ground beef, ground lamb, or shrimp. The vegetables can be Chinese cabbage, green onion, leek, chives, shiitake mushroom, water chestnut, etc.

Jiaozi can be boiled or shallow-fried and then steamed. When shallow-fried and steamed, it’s call potsticker.

On Chinese New Year’s eve, making and eating dumpling is a tradition in China. Family members would get together to make jiaozi.

Ingredients

• 3 lbs lean ground pork
• 1 bunch green onions
• 8 pieces shallots
• 2 medium onions
• few celery sticks
• 10 pieces of dried shiitake mushroom, soak overnight
• 4 packages of dumpling skins, about 200 pieces

Seasoning:

• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 3 teaspoons salt
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 2 teaspoons corn starch
• 1/2 teaspoon white pepper
• 2 eggs

All the ingredients except the dumpling skins and eggs have to be chopped finely. Mix all the ingredients except the dumpling skins together with the seasonings in a large bowl.

Click on the link below for the instructions.

continue reading "Jiaozi (Chinese Dumpling)"

My late mum used to make a Chinese vegetarian dish (Loh Hon Jai) on the first day of Chinese New Year. I have not eaten this dish for a long time until my next door neighbour, Richard and Jeanie shared it with me. The dish brought back so much sweet memories and I’m really grateful to Richard and Jeanie for sharing the recipe with me.

Ingredients

• Fresh oyster mushrooms
• Dried shiitake mushrooms, reconstituted or fresh shiitake mushrooms
• Cloud ear mushrooms, reconstituted
• Cabbages, blanched
• Fried gluten (mien gen), blanched to remove excess oil
• Can fried gluten, remove top later of oil but reserve the liquid
• Fried tofu puff, the rectangular type
• Fried bean curd stick, blanched until soft
• Bean curd skin, lightly fried
• Vemicelli (tung fen), cooked in boiling water for 2 minutes and rinse off in cold water
• Shanghai bean curd, red (lam yue), mushed up to dissolve in some water and strain if necessary
• Corn starch solution
• few cloves of garlic, chopped

You may any mushrooms in season or can mushroom like straw mushroom, button mushroom, inoki mushroom, etc. The Shanghai red bean curd can be substituted with oyster sauce.

Click on the link below for the instructions.

continue reading "Chinese Vegetarian Dish (Loh Hon Zhai)"

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Polly came over and helped me make Lo Bak Go. I am glad she came over because it’s a lot of work making this. I learned this from a previous Community Kitchen class.

Lo bak go (蘿蔔糕 lo bak go, 萝卜糕 luóbogāo) are savory cakes are made from grated daikon radishes. The daikons are mixed with bits of dried shrimp and chinese sausages that are steamed and then cut into slices and pan-fried. Chinese people normally make Lo Bak Go in the Chinese New Year.

As the name implies, the main ingredient is the daikon radish, which is also known as chinese turnip (or lo bak). The rice flour and corn starch is used to hold the cake together. The other ingredients such as chinese sausage, mushrooms, shallots and dried shrimp are used for flavouring.

Here is how Polly and I make the dish:

We started off grating the daikon. It was easy with the food processor.

We then cooked the daikon with some water for 20 minutes. This will soften the daikon.

While waiting for the Daikon to cook, we chopped the flavouring ingredients into small pieces. This is really hard work. I am not sure if I should use the food processor for this because the ingredients are pretty hard.

We then fried the ingredients at the same time until they are fragrant. We forgot to add in the seasonings, like salt, pepper and sugar!!

We mixed the corn starch and rice flour in water before we pour it over the fried ingredients together with the cooked daikon.

We need to stir the mixture until it turns into paste. This is a difficult part because we need a lot of arm strength to stir through the thick mixture. After this, we steamed the mixture for one hour.

The lo bak go could be served warm or if you chose to freeze it, you need to fry it before serving. It is best eaten with sweet chilli sauce (lat jiu jeong) or sweet sauce (tim jeong).

We are bringing this dish to our little Chinese New Year gathering this weekend at Sabrina and Eric’s new house. Thanks Polly for coming over today. Let me know how your kids like it.