When I lived in China I ate a lot of different dumplings. My favorite were the pork and cabbage ones however.
This recipe takes my favorite flavors and pushes them up a notch. I like to do extra garlic and ginger making the meat a little spicier. Sometimes I even add some of this Black Bean Chilli Paste to make them spicier. A TBLS or two will go far.
Pork and Cabbage Dumplings
1 lb ground pork
8 ounces Nappa cabbage sliced thin (Find the Nappa! Other cabbage just isn’t the same)
4 scallions, green and white parts, finely chopped
1.5 inches of grated or finely chopped ginger
2 cloves of grated or finely chopped garlic
2 tsp sesame oil
1.5 TBLS Black bean paste
1/2 cup chicken stock
2 tsp salt
Mix all together with your hands and really mix, beat, etc until all the moisture from the broth is super well incorporate.
I like to use the square wrappers, fill with like 1.5 tsp of filling, fold into triangle and then attach the left and right corners together.
Here is a more detailed video on how to fold a dumpling:
We don’t judge on the fold. My daughter and I have decided our favorite way right now is to roll them kind of like a flat taquito. We also love eating them in this shape as well.
Then you can either boil them (for about 6-8 minutes in boiling water. If you do boil your dumplings then they need to be well sealed with no openings to the meat.
I like to put them in an oiled frying pan and cook about 4 minutes until one side is light brown and crunchy. Then I pour about 1/2 cup of water in the pan and put a lid on them to cook about another 4 minutes.
I like to combine soy sauce with my favorite chilli crisp to dip!
Now stuff yourselves. Chi-Fan! (Eat up) And Gan-Bei! (Bottoms up)
People have asked and I have even been asking myself why I have decided to start a blog. Well, I have been thinking and journalling about that a lot and I am still unsure.
The best reasons I can come up with currently are that I think it will help me return to a time period of my life that I think I was the most mentally healthy and happy.
Not that I am unhappy now.
It was just a time before doom scrolling, smart phones, being constantly accessible to everyone, A.I., my own internal middle-aged anxiety, etc…. before my life existed mostly around the internet.
I’m an elderly millenial and I remember life before computers and the internet. I still play Oregon Trail for fun. In college we would read books in silly accents around a fire while sipping warm Mead to make each other laugh. I built potato guns in high school that got confiscated from us.
I remeber before one could stream and I would watch TV shows when they were scheduled. Late nights in highschool watching reruns of “Friends” and “Mad About You”.
I learned how to stream (binge watch) when I lived in China while in the Peace Corps. All the other volunteers were talking about what they were watching and I was so out of touch. In China they had a website called Youku.com (like Youtube…but without the liscensing laws) that you could find EVERYTHING on. I started streaming all day every day. I started with HBO’s “Six Feet Under” and have never been the same since.
I learned I could do my hobbies while having these shows in the background that I became SO addicted to. These characters were my friends in China.
But I also really regret this finding, although it feels like I learned the new normal, because I used to sit in a coffee shop and knit, or write, or daydream and think. I feel like I need so much background noise, entertainment, and distraction in my life these days. I can’t even watch a movie on TV without also scrolling my phone at the same time.
The world has rewired our brains.
My favorite thing to do when I was in China was when I was travelling on a bus or train somewhere, I would stare out the window and just daydream. It was mostly about what it would look like if the people I loved from America came and experienced what I was doing in China and meeting all my friends and students there. It would carry me for hours.
I would sit there and write and then rewrite the daydream over and over and over. I used to love the daydream of my favorite people in the world coming together and having a great time. Now I don’t even feel like I see many of my favorite people anymore.
And so much of that is due to parenthood and business and being an adult. And I hold no one more accountable than myself. But times have changed and I am longing for something different.
So I am hoping this blog will help inspire me to pull myself back into a place that I am DOING things. I am THINKING about things. I am EXPERIENCING things. Taking PICTURES of things and making them memories. (But I am really terrible at remembering to take pictures. I have always been someone that likes to remember the memory… and I know when I have the picture, the picture becomes the memory…and it’s limited). But I will try my best.
Stick with me. I am new to this, but I think a lot of us are feeling this way.
So I want us to start clearing the bullshit out of our lives and experiencing life experiences again together.
So, I will stop blabbing now and will give you a little taste of my next post:
I will be sharing my recipe for dumplings since we are in the Chinese New Year!
I hope you are as excited as I am. (P.S. we judge not on how someone chooses to roll their dumpling. Beauty is in the eye of the creator.)
