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Recipe: chinese dumplings and potstickers

[warning: a long post]

Do you know what that one recipe was that started you on your cooking passion? I have cooked since I was a kid, but I didn’t get serious until I was a sophomore in college and I felt this cultural obligation to make dumplings from scratch to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Dumplings have lodged themselves in my head as my link to Chinese cooking and culture, but even better than that – mastering dumplings gave me the confidence to go forward and try other recipes and techniques.

for the pork filling

I posted Making Chinese Dumplings with Jen on my website several years ago (it now lives here). People have written asking about fillings, thanking me for my recipe, asking me to post more versions… The endeavor to make Chinese dumplings isn’t like pouring a can of soda – it’s quite involved and taking the photos adds considerably more time. Seeing as my days of free time may be near an end, I decided Making Chinese Dumplings with Jen could use an upgrade and an added variation. Besides, that old version was created in graduate school, a time of simultaneously happy and extremely bad, miserable, loathsome, angry, depressing, unhappy associations for me.

there is an ungodly amount of chopping involved

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Recipe: savory bread pudding

I had attempted a savory bread pudding earlier in the year, only to discover that marjoram tastes like soap and ruined the whole dish for me. I swore to myself that my next version would include bacon and omit marjoram. And indeed, I did just that and then some. I am a huge fan of sweet bread puddings. I prefer to work with chocolate when making desserts, but I love to eat non-chocolate desserts, if that makes any sense? So I thought that a savory bread pudding with some of my favorite ingredients would work out.

the cheeses and green onions

I replaced 2 cups of swiss with 2 cups of gruyère because I love the intensity of a good cooked gruyère. And I used broccoli instead of asparagus (because broccoli was on sale), and added mushrooms and of course – the beloved bacon. All hail the piggy! Such a magical animal…

an undeniably delicious combination

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Recipe: beef stew

I think I caught a cold during the fall color shooting frenzy this weekend. As long as I got some good shots, it was worth the trouble. Sometimes travel can be delightful when you discover really good food – particularly cheap and delicious street food. But that stuff isn’t to be found in Colorado ski resorts where the mantra is to milk someone for every dime you can possibly dislodge from their pockets. I am constantly astonished whenever we get railroaded into eating in a ski resort village (which is rare). We pay far too much money for really pathetic quality. I think it’s a Colorado thing – they are located too close to the flats.

When we rolled into our driveway yesterday, I had two things on my mind: 1) nap and 2) beef stew. I had made a large pot of beef stew before we left for the weekend. I just didn’t want the beef going south on us during our trip and figured it would be nice to come home to a quick meal that only required some reheating. Couldn’t bring it in a cooler to nuke in our room because of the very bumpy dirt roads we were traveling. Trust me, I have experience driving in the field with a cooler full of foods that decided to unceremoniously merge in the back of the truck.

Back to the stew… I have a love affair with many foods, but it delights me to no end when you can take a cheap and tough cut of meat and transform it into the most tender and mouth-watering dish with some patient slow-cooking. And I think this is a dying art because people are short on time and short on the knowledge. This home-style food shows up on restaurant menus because no one does it themselves anymore. Sad, really. I bought a hunk of beef chuck and spent a good amount of time trimming the fat (they include a honking amount on these babies) while cutting into nice cubes. Kaweah sat not more than a foot away, watching devotedly and licking her chops every few minutes.

big cubes of beef chuck

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