Chinese green onion pancakes!

In light of the fact that this weekend's likely to be fairly cooking-intensive (it's going to be our first Christmas gathering at the new house!), we're doing soup and sandwiches for dinners this week. Consequently, this means there are odds and ends in the fridge. Given that I've got about ¼ lb. of cooked roast pork to use up, plus a few avocadoes, plus a bit of leaf lettuce, and had a bunch of green onions, I decided to make up a batch of Chinese green onion pancakes (having had the forethought to pick up garlic hoisin sauce and sunflower oil — which I use as a sesame oil substitute), and make wraps.

I used the quantities provided by Chef John's Chinese Scallion Pancakes recipe, with the modifications suggested by "Huadong Feng" (currently the pinned comment in that video's comment thread), using chopped, whole green onion, and cooking the onion in oil. I departed from those by then adding flour to the cooked onion and oil mixture until my roux was pale blonde.

Pictured is the first cooked pancake of the day. Not pictured are the wraps I made, stuffed with chopped pork, hoisin, avocado, and leaf lettuce (which is about as close to Heaven as you can get in food-form, methinks).

First batch of (this home) homemade bread!

This recipe is from the much-admired (around these parts) The Complete Guide to Cooking Techniques by Norma Macmillan (which is also the cookbook that taught me how to make risotto and pie crust). This is also the first time I used the dough hook on my 15 year-old KitchenAid stand mixer. It kneaded the dough considerably faster than I could have, for a double-batch of bread dough. I think I'll use it again.

Let there be light

After an entire year of inactivity due to Kara's decision that she didn't like the taste of "burnt" (read: charred) food, the grill was fired up for Saturday's housewarming at our place.

Before the guests arrived, I grilled up a couple of breakfast hamburgers for her and me, and am exceedingly pleased to announce that Kara deemed her burger "the best". She then proceeded to heap praises upon my cooking technique, to which I responded that the grill really was responsible for that amazing flavour. Looks like we'll get to use it a few more times before Winter sets in!

Our first-ever batch of scratch-made homemade dumplings!

Yesterday's cool weather and the general sense of mild exhaustion that came following a two-night-visit from Caty at our new house led us to finally getting around to making homemade dumplings.

We followed China Sichuan Food's Dumpling Wrappers recipe for the skins, portioning the dough into 4 batches before further breaking those down into 15-12 portions per quarter. In total, about 50 dumplings were made — and about half were consumed! The remainder are freezing on a waxed paper-lined sheet tray in the freezer. As I got more practice, the dumplings became much more even in shape, too.

For the filling, I had to hand-chop a little over a pound of pork belly (my food processor simply didn't want to further break up the chunks I'd cut — a feat which my now slightly-sore right shoulder is a bit peeved about), a little less than a pound of cooked ground chicken (that Kara decided she didn't want to eat earlier in the week), a bunch of chopped green onions, a head of chopped garlic, a knob of chopped ginger, a few mushrooms I had leftover from an earlier pizza-making venture, Chinese cooking wine, tamari, President's Choice 5-Spice Blend, salt, white pepper, and freshly-ground black pepper. About 1/3 of the filling is unused and went into a freezer bag for later.

While these are far from the most photogenic of Chinese dumplings ever made, the flavour was phenomenal! I went heavy-handed with the ginger and don't regret it in the least.