Dumplings are Delicious

My family and I enjoyed an excellent dumpling dinner a couple nights ago. I poked and prodded the internet for a recipe that sounded like it would suit our tastes. Everything, of course, had ginger in it and my little sister is allergic, so that was going to be an obvious adaptation. Eventually, I found this delicious recipe from An Intimate Hunger. Posted below is my adaptation of that recipe. I advise going to her blog to check out the original, especially because I'm not posting the recipe for her dipping sauce here and it's excellent with the dumplings. Also, these dumplings are sweeter than most, because of the way I tweaked the recipe.

Ingredients
1 Pkg won-ton wrappers (We got about 50 in our package)
1 lb ground pork
2/3 T Cardamom
1/3 T Cinnamon
1/4 t Chile Powder (I used Ancho Chile Powder because it's what I had on hand. This particular variety has very little heat, but makes the other flavors richer. Vary this to suit your tastes.)
2 T green onion, minced (I prefer my onion chopped fine, but tiny little minced up bits aren't strictly necessary.)
3 medium cloves garlic, minced
2 T soy sauce
1 T sesame oil
1 large egg, beaten
Half an apple, grated (or more, if you like less pork and more fruit.)

Flour for dusting.

Be aware that you'll probably want a cookie sheet by the end of this. If you don't have one, get out the wax paper, because you're going to want it.

Mince up your green onions and throw them in the microwave for roughly 30 seconds to soften them up. Then, in a large bowl, combine all the ingredients EXCEPT FLOUR well. The best way to do this is to dig your hands down into the raw pork and work everything together. It is disgusting, but effective.

Refrigerate for 1/2 hour to an hour to let the flavors meld a bit.

In the meantime, make the dipping sauce.

Dust your cookie sheet or wax paper with flour. Keep a bunch of flour handy, because you're going to need to put more down. Won-ton wrappers are designed to get sticky when wet, so when water gets on your folding/wrapping surface (and it will), you need to soak it up with flour or your won-ton wrappers will rip open and you will have ruined, or at least marred, your dumpling. And that would be sad.

Have a small bowl of water handy, and a brush for brushing water on to the wrapper. Lay out your first won ton wrapper and brush the edges with water. Or the whole wrapper. Both the author of the original recipe and I just brushed water over the entire wrapper and it came out just fine. Using a spoon, place a heaping (or more or less, depending on the size of your wrappers) teaspoon of your pork mixture off-center in the wrapper, fold one half over the other and press the edges together to form a tight seal. I say off-center because it makes it easier to fold the won-ton wrapper over. Place on floured surface and continue through the rest of the wrappers and pork.

Get some steaming apparatus going. I used a frying pan with a vegetable steamer placed into it and scrounged up a lid that fit. It fit 8 dumplings at a time. Put your dumplings in and steam for 20 minutes.

Devour.

Here's what mine looked like after steaming:



That's the second batch of dumplings. I only got one from the first batch because my family ate the rest without me.

I used up the entire package of won-ton wrappers, but we certainly did not eat fifty dumplings between the four of us that night. The rest were left on the cookie sheet, covered in plastic wrap and thrown in the freezer until they were completely frozen, then tossed into a zip lock bag. There's half of a one-gallon bag in the freezer and it's full of dumplings. 20 minute snack, appetizer, dinner, whatever.

Go forth and nom! (And if you make your own alterations to this recipe, I would love to hear about them.)

Dried Fruit Breakfast Biscuits

When I get bored, I bake. This usually involves taking my stand-by biscuit recipe and doing strange and unusual things to it. Sometimes, the results are great (this recipe and the Cheese and Tomato Sauce Biscuits, for example) and other time, they're an abysmal flop (when I tried to add cocoa powder). These came out rather well, I think, and so I'm sharing the recipe. They're kind of like scones, but don't quite qualify.

Dried Fruit Breakfast Biscuits

Ingredients

2 C flour (plus a little extra)
1 T plus ¼ t. baking powder
1/3 C cooking oil
2/3 C milk (plus a little extra) - not skim, preferably
2-3 T honey (Or more, or less, to suit your taste.)
3 handfuls dried fruit (or so. I'm guessing my handfuls came to a total of about ¾ C) Use raisins, craisins, dried apricots, etc. Don't use super dry things like banana chips.
1 egg (beaten)

Preheat oven to 450º F.

Mix flour and baking soda and about half of your fruit in a large mixing bowl. Add milk and oil. Don't add it all at once; it'll make stirring everything until well-blended easier. Instead, pour about half in, then add the rest so you can get the stuff that hides at the bottom. Much easier in the long run.

Add the egg and the honey and the rest of your fruit and stir until it's all thoroughly mixed together. The dough is probably a bitch to handle at this point, so add flour bit by bit until it's manageable. If you're concerned about it becoming too dry, throw more milk in.

When it's not so sticky that touching it will leave your hand covered in goop, turn the whole business on to wax paper and knead it a couple time. If the wax paper rips, consider it done. Turn on to floured surface or more wax paper. Roll with rolling pin (flour the rolling pin or the dough will stick to it and make a mess) until it's all ½ inch thick. Cut with a round cookie cutter. I used one with a 3" diameter. Aim for the big side, because the fruit will make smaller biscuits fall apart.

Place biscuits at least an inch apart (and preferably closer to 2, but you have some wiggle room on that) on lightly greased cookie sheet and bake for about 12-15 minutes. Once they start getting a bit golden brown, turn off the oven, crack open the door and let them cook in the residual heat for another 3-5 minutes.

I don't know how many this actually makes. I forgot to count when I put these in the oven and by the time I remembered to count again, several had been eaten.

Note: This recipe is based on one from my mother's ancient Betty Crocker cookbook and started out with only the flour, baking soda, oil and milk. I've obviously adapted it quite a bit so feel free to muck about with this recipe to your heart's content. Nuts, vanilla, whatever. Go crazy. If anything works out particularly well, please let me know, because I'd love to hear about it! :)