Asian Dumpling Tips

Countdown to Chinese New Year: Easy Dumpling, Cocktail, and Decorating Ideas

You may be thinking of nachos, guacamole and Super Bowl Sunday, but I’m focusing on the weekend after that: Valentine’s Day – Sunday, February 14 – to be exact, when people all over the world will also be celebrating Lunar New Year. It will be a double whammy – a romantic, luck-laden weekend.

Don’t miss out on doing something for Lunar New Year in 2010. It does not need to be extravagant. What’s important is getting together with family and friends to relax and renew.  Late last year, my friend and colleague Jennifer Spiegel of Fork and Spoon event productions in San Francisco and I talked at length about how we can encourage people to have fun with Chinese New Year. The holiday can be intimidating if you get bogged down in too many details. What if you take a hassle-free approach? What’s involved?

Jennifer and I brainstormed and a couple of weeks ago had the opportunity to put our Chinese New Year ideas on camera. We teamed up to tape a short segment for View from the Bay, a popular San Francisco television show that broadcasts on our local ABC News affiliate. The segment aired this afternoon and is below for you to watch. Recipes are posted at the View from the Bay site.

You may recall that last October, I showed View from the Bay hosts Janelle Wang and Spencer Christian how to make baked char siu bao pork buns. This time around, Jennifer and I had Nick Smith on camera with us. We shot the segment in the Fork and Spoon kitchen, which is where I worked with Pablo to make hundreds of Asian dumplings for 125 people.  

In less than 2 weeks, be prepared to say “Goodbye” to the Year of the Ox and “Hello” to the Year of the Tiger. Maybe our baked spiced lamb and potato curry puff, Shanghai Tiger cocktail, and nifty centerpiece will be part of your festivities?

Corn Husks and Banana Leaves Make Perfect Parcels

  

For lunch today, I enjoyed a seemingly unusual combination plate of Mexican chicken tamale and Indonesian lemper ayam (sticky rice and spicy chicken wrapped in banana leaf). I had both in the freezer and without much thought, I thawed and steamed them together. The tamale came from Mr. Cruz, a family friend who has up until the recent past gifted my parents his family’s homemade tamales for Christmas. The lemper ayam were leftover from recipe developing that I did a long time back; I actually can’t recall when I made them (maybe – gulp – a year ago) but can safely report that they refreshed to 85% of their original selves. It was a sensational lunch that delivered me to warmer climes, and I forgot, for a short while, that it was around 40 degrees outside.

If you’re a Saveur magazine reader, you may have read a short story in the December 2009 issue about Mr. Cruz’s tamales. They were what got me making Asian leaf-wrapped parcels for our Christmas gatherings. (Both are leaf-wrapped, have carby insides and spicy fillings, and cooked by steam. They’re members of the global dumpling family.) When Mr. Cruz learned that I was writing about him for Saveur, he was so touched that he made a special batch of tamales on Thanksgiving Day and brought them over to my parents’ house. Tamales are part of the Nochebuena (Chrismas Eve) tradition but since Mr. Cruz plans to spend that holiday in Mexico, he created a new tradition of tamales for El Dia de Gracias. Below is a photo of Mr. Cruz that my Dad snapped for the artist rendering in the magazine piece:

Before I left my folk’s house, I packed half a dozen of Mr. Cruz’s tamales in a plastic bag. Back in Santa Cruz, I tucked them away in the freezer for days like today, when it’s cold outside and I want to savor something steamy and satisfying. Dumplings surely fit the bill. So go crazy this holiday season and throw some Asian dumplings into your gifting routine. The recipients will love your generosity.

For more information:

• Try the sweet  Thai banana and sticky rice packets recipe (kao tom padt) from the article. Note that it’s different from the one in Asian Dumplings as the editors decided to omit the black beans.
• Enter Saveur’s Asian Dumplings Contest to win a FREE copy of my cookbook.
• Tips on how to use banana leaves

Zongzi Wrapping Lesson from a Master

This Thursday, May 28 is the fifth day of the fifth moon according the Lunar Calendar. On that day, a good billion plus people around the world will be celebrating Duānwǔ Jié (端午節), a Chinese holiday that’s also known as the Double Fifth Festival in China and the Dragon Boat Festival in the West. What’s the deal with dragon boats? The story is that the holiday commemorates the drowning suicide death of Qu Yuan, a poet, scholar, and minister to the King of Chu in 278 BCE. A man willing to sacrifice his own life for the sake of his moral convictions, Qu was banished for treason when the king allied with a rival warlord. When the rival warlord over took the Chu state, Qu threw himself into the Miluo River in Hunan province.

The local people admired Qu so much that they attempted to preserve his body by throwing food into the river to distract the fish from eating his corpse. This is how the practice of making zòngzi , a.k.a. Chinese tamales, began. You have to paddle dragon boats out into the river and then throw the bamboo-leaf wrapped dumplings into the water. Pyramid-like zòngzi, made primarily of sticky rice and either a sweet or savory filling, becomes very heavy and hearty after its hours boiling so they’re bound to keep the fish busy for a while.