Kung Hay Fat Choy!

Happy Chinese New Year everyone! Here's wishing you a joyful Year of the Rabbit!

Today I find myself reminiscing about good friends and celebrations from years past, and hoping for a year of fun and new friendships to come. Here's wishing you all that and more.

Wonton skin recipe

Since you asked, here's the recipe for the wonton skins I made. It is from the Joyce Chen Cookbook.

Wonton skins (recipe also used for egg roll skins and egg noodles)

2 c. flour
1 egg or egg white (I used the whole egg)
1/3 c. cold water

Beat the egg with water and add to flour. Stir thoroughly until well mixed. Knead for about 5 minutes into a stiff dough. Cover dough with a damp cloth and let set for at least 30 minutes.

This dough should be very stiff and after covering with a damp cloth the dough will be more smooth and softened a little. Since the dryness of the flour is influenced by the humidity of the weather, sometimes the flour has to be kept in a very dry place or it will not form together. You must then wet your hands, shaking off the excess water, and knead until the dough forms together. You may wet your hands for a second time but never over three times.

Put about 1 cup dry corn starch in a clean handkerchief or two layers of cheese cloth, tightening with string to flour the board and dough. [editor's note: dusting with cornstarch helped A LOT to keep the noodles from sticking to eachother.] If making noodles, divide the dough into four equal parts and form each into a round cake. Roll flat repeatedly until dough is very thin and about 12" in diameter. Flour both sides, then cut into about 1/16" wide strips. [editor: I used a KitchenAid pasta roller attachment, which worked great.]

To make egg roll and wonton skins, divide the dough into six pieces and follow the same procedure as for noodles. Roll out also to 12" in diameter which will make the skins thinner than the noodles. Cut the thin cake into four quadrants to make egg roll skins. Cut into nine even pieces for wonton skins.

Happy cooking!

Kung Hay Fatt Choy!

Our Chinese New Years Eve party was a success. We fed 14 people and had only a bit of leftovers. The company was great and the food was awesome.

This was the menu:

Cooked spinach salad with walnut dressing
Homemade potstickers with lamb filling
Seasoned black mushrooms
Wonton soup with wontons made from scratch
Char siu baos (steamed bbq pork buns)
Pork & shrimp lo mein (noodle dish)
Whole ocean trout, steamed
Sticky rice New Year cake
Almond cookies
Clementines and canned lychee fruit

These were all new recipes to us, so there was an element of discovery and experimentation in the process. The reviews were very positive. I doubt anyone went away hungry. Some even took home leftovers.

Homemade potstickers. Aren't they beautiful?

First course: spinach salad (the green stuff in the bowl) and seasoned mushrooms (in the brown bowl). The first batch of potstickers had already been devoured.

Remnants of the lo mein (red platter) and ocean trout (round platter). The ocean trout was amazingly moist and buttery tasting. Sooooo good.

I was having so much fun eating and cooking and socializing that I forgot to take pictures. So little photographic evidence of the feast exists (note the absence of wonton soup and bao pictures - we were all busy cooking or eating). Oh well. It was delicious. We'll definitely make these dishes again, though probably not all at once - it's a lot of work.

When you invite friends and then refuse to let them bring something for the meal, they instead bring you lovely, useful gifts. Like toilet paper. Thanks, Ellen! We'll think of you whenever... ok, maybe it's better that we don't. But thanks!

We wrapped up the evening by playing with Doodle's wooden play food (who'd have thought a bunch of biology nerds would love cutting apart pieces of wooden food attached with velcro?) and an awe-inspiring round of dish washing. To everyone who stayed and cleaned our kitchen: thank you. You are now our favorite people. And you're on the top of the invite list for next year. :-)

I'm off to enjoy the last bit of wonton soup and almond cookies.

Kung Hay Fatt Choy, everyone!
(that means Happy New Year)

Chinese New Year prep, part 3

Char siu baos: success. Dee-licious! That's a bao above, but not a photo I took. The bao, and directions for making it, are here. Or more drool-worthy photos on Flickr here.

Almond cookies: success. Also delicious. I'll have pictures once our darn rechargeable batteries will stay charged. (grumble grumble)

This afternoon we'll be up to our ears in wontons and jiaozi (potstickers) if all goes well.

I'll share any recipes requested after this mad culinary spree is done. But now, back to the kitchen!

Chinese New Year prep, part 2

Chinese barbecued pork: done. Remarkably easy.
Egg noodles from scratch: done. Easier than I thought, especially with a pasta roller setup.
Wonton wrappers: done. Ditto, as this recipe is the same as the egg noodle one. Two birds with one stone and all that jazz. Hooray!

J is in the kitchen right now working on char siu bows (or baos) - steamed barbecued pork buns. They're really more of a dim sum dish, but they're one of his favorites (and mine) so we're making them.

Tomorrow we wrap the wontons and make the potstickers (jiaozi) and almond cookies.

Then Sunday we'll steam lots of stuff, make rice, a cooked spinach salad, wonton soup, a noodle dish (lo mein) and sticky rice new years cakes (nian gao). Then we feast!

Chinese New Year prep, part 1

J and I have decided to have a proper Chinese New Year celebration. Ok, so it'll be on Chinese New Years Eve (this Sunday), but still. We're going to make a bunch of yummy Chinese food, which we're both excited and kind of nervous about. Why nervous, you ask? Because neither of us have ever made any of these dishes before. And we'll be serving them to guests. So we'll see how it goes.

I think we've finally got almost all of the ingredients, so today I started prepping stuff.

Chinese barbecued pork - sliced and currently marinading in the fridge. We'll cook it either tonight or tomorrow.

Egg noodles/wonton wrappers - dough is resting, and will be flattened and sliced into noodles using our super awesome KitchenAid pasta roller/cutter setup shortly. If that works well, I'll make some more and cut it into wonton wrappers while Doodle is napping.

More updates as we make progress and learn what to do (or, probably more accurately, what not to do) when trying out some new Chinese dishes.

Chinese New Year is coming...

Celebrate an Ox-picious Year
Originally uploaded by chooyutshing

...we're gearing up to "celebrate an ox-picious year".

(2009 is the Year of the Ox. Tee hee.)

Photo from Flickr.