Category Archives: Freestyle

Chinese Freestyle Recipes

Pork and Vegetable Dumplings — My Way

June 17, 2012 – 6:38 pm

Chi­nese are obsessed with all sorts of dumplings, we have them pan-fried, steamed, or even in soups. I like to make my own when­ever pos­si­ble. That way, I am in con­trol of what goes it and its sea­son­ings so they can be quite healthy and deli­cious. Com­pared to store-bought ones, of course I pre­fer my home­made ver­sion. There are end­less ways to make them and they dif­fer in dif­fer­ent regions of China. In Man­darin Chi­nese, they are called “jiao-zi” or in Can­tonese, “gao-ji” and “gyoza” in Japan­ese. Some­times they are called “pot-stickers” if they are pan-fried.

The way I make them is def­i­nitely influ­enced by Can­tonese cui­sine. The napa cab­bage in the recipe is pick­led by using salt to extract the water, result­ing in a crunchy tex­ture. It is then mixed into ground pork shoul­der, I find this cut of pork works well in this recipe because it has a good tex­ture that isnt too soft nor too stiff. To make a tasty chive vari­a­tion, you can also add chopped Chinese/garlic chives directly into the pork in place of the picked napa cabbage.

I some­times make the dumplings from scratch, that includes mak­ing the wrap­per from flour and water just like how restau­rants do it — I could also con­trol the thick­ness of the wrap­per but it is time-consuming. So if I don’t have the time, I often buy ready-made wrap­pers from the super­mar­ket which saves me all the knead­ing and rolling.

Print
Pork and Veg­etable Dumplings

Yield: 80–90 pieces

Ingre­di­ents

  • 1 pack­age Ready-made Dumpling Wrap­pers — about 1 lb. (not Won­ton wrappers)
    • Picked Cab­bage:
  • 620 g Napa Cab­bage, chopped
  • 3 tsp Salt
    • Pork and Seasoning:
  • 730 g Pork Shoul­der, ground
  • 2 tsp Sugar
  • 3 tbsp Soy Sauce
  • 1 tbsp Minced Ginger
  • 2 tbsp Rice Wine (optional)
  • 3 tbsp Corn Starch
  • ¼ cup Water
  • 1 tbsp Veg­etable Oil
  • 2 tsp Toasted Sesame oil (optional)

Method

    Picked Cab­bage:
  1. Chop napa cab­bage into lit­tle pieces, place in a colan­der — it will look like a lot but will shrink when the water is squeezed out. Add 2 tsp of salt into it and let it sit for about 5–10 minutes.
  2. Squeeze out the excess water from the cab­bage, and drain. Set aside until ready to use.
    3. Sea­son­ing the Pork:
  3. Add the fol­low­ing sea­son­ings into the ground pork: soy sauce, sugar, rice wine, and minced gin­ger. Mix until incorporated.
  4. Mix in the corn starch.
  5. Add water in sev­eral addi­tions, mix­ing after each addition.
  6. Mix in pick­led cab­bage, veg­etable oil, and sesame oil.
    7. Mak­ing the Dumplings:
  7. Place about 2 tea­spoons of fill­ing onto a piece of dumpling wrapper.
  8. Dab your fin­ger with some water and spread the water around the edges of the wrapper.
  9. Fold the wrap­per in half and press the edges together firmly.
  10. You can also make some creases on one side of the wrap­per before fold­ing in half to make it look nicer.
    11. Pan-frying:
  11. Heat some veg­etable oil in a non-stick fry pan in with medium heat. Place dumplings into pan.
  12. Add water until it reaches about ¼ of the dumplings’ height.
  13. Place a lid on the pan and let it sim­mer with medium heat for about 5–7 minutes.
  14. Remove lid, the water should be almost all gone by now. As the water evap­o­rates, the crust will start to form on the bot­tom, fry until the bot­tom of the dumplings are golden brown.
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I always make extra and freeze them and they can be steamed, boiled, or pan-fried with­out defrost­ing. To freeze, place them on a tray sep­a­rated and place the whole tray in the freezer until the dumplings are frozen. Store them in a freezer bag until ready to cook. (Note that cook­ing time will be longer if cook­ing frozen dumplings.) It makes a con­ve­nient quick meal or an appe­tizer. You can also eas­ily make chicken dumplings by replac­ing the pork with chicken. I’ve made a tasty veg­e­tar­ian ver­sion by fill­ing them with sea­soned chopped cab­bage, car­rots, shi­itake mush­rooms, and Chi­nese ver­mi­celli. It is very easy to be cre­ative with the filling.

You can tell when home­made food really makes a dif­fer­ence espe­cially when you have fresh ingredients!

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Freestyle Recipes Soup

Easy Vegetable Beef Barley Soup

May 16, 2012 – 2:45 pm

Besides bak­ing, I also love mak­ing soups because they are super easy to make and of course they taste much bet­ter than their canned coun­ter­parts. For me, there is really no rea­son to buy canned soups when it is so sim­ple to make and it is much health­ier. Unless of course if you are tak­ing it to camp­ing. In this recipe, I have used my home canned toma­toes, in which the recipe can be found here. But you can always use store-bought, it would taste just as good. I have also used pearl bar­ley, which needs to be cooked before adding it into the soup. Alter­na­tively, you can also add quick-cooking bar­ley directly into the soup and sim­mer for a short time until it is tender.

 

Print
Easy Veg­etable Beef Bar­ley Soup

Ingre­di­ents

  • 1–2 tbsp. Veg­etable Oil
  • 1 lb. Stew­ing Beef, cubed
  • 4 stalks of Cel­ery, diced
  • 1 medium Car­rot, diced
  • 2 medium Onions, diced
  • 1 cup Pearl Barley
  • 500 mL Canned Tomatoes
  • 4 cups Hot Water
  • 2 Beef Bouil­lon Cubes
  • 2 Bay Leaves
  • 2–4 sprigs of fresh Thyme

Method

  1. Cook bar­ley if you are using pearl bar­ley — I cooked 1 cup of pearl bar­ley in 2 cups of water in my rice cooker.
  2. Dice all the veg­eta­bles to bite size.
  3. Heat oil in a large heavy pot or dutch oven on high heat. Sautee stew­ing beef until browned on all sides — this will give the soup more flavour.
  4. Add diced veg­eta­bles and sautee for about 3–4 more minutes.
  5. Pour in the hot water, canned toma­toes, bay leaves, thyme, and beef bouillon.
  6. Bring the soup to a boil and reduce heat and sim­mer until the beef is tender.
  7. Add cooked pearl bar­ley and cook for 5–10 minutes.
  8. Remove bay leaves, and thyme sprigs.
  9. Salt and pep­per to taste.
  10. Optional: Gar­nish with chopped parsley.
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This flavour­ful soup makes a great lunch or din­ner com­pan­ion. I love the chewy tex­ture that is left in the cooked bar­ley and the earthy aroma of the thyme. I’ve used good qual­ity, organic beef bouil­lon cubes but of course beef stock or veg­etable stock will also work well in the recipe.

 

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Baking Cake Dessert Freestyle Recipes

Strawberry Shortcake: my version

August 29, 2011 – 2:26 pm

It has been a while since I baked and assem­bled a nice-looking cake from scratch. It was my mom’s birth­day last Fri­day, birth­days = cakes. I orig­i­nally thought of just mak­ing some kind of dessert but a cake is just much more cel­e­bra­tory. I wanted to make a fresh mango cake but man­goes were not in sea­son (too bad). Straw­berry it was. I didn’t really fol­low a spe­cific recipe for the whole cake except for the basic sponge cake. I used a Génoise cake recipe, the ingre­di­ents are very sim­ple but it is not the sim­plest cake to make. It is basi­cally just eggs, sugar, flour, but­ter and a lit­tle vanilla extract. The lay­ers con­sist of whipped cream, my own home­made straw­berry jam, fresh straw­ber­ries, and a honey syrup. I used chopped pis­ta­chios as a gar­nish on top and sides — makes a very good con­trast of colours with the strawberries!

Ingre­di­ents:

Génoise Sponge Cake (7″ cake):

  • 3 Large Eggs (approx. 55 grams each)
  • 100 grams Gran­u­lated Sugar
  • 100 grams Cake Flour (soft wheat flour) — sift
  • 50 grams Melted Butter
  • 1 tsp. Vanilla Extract

Lay­ers:

  • 450 mL Whip­ping Cream
  • 3 tbsp. Gran­u­lated Sugar
  • Approx. 6 Large Straw­ber­ries — wash, dry, hull and cut into halves + more for garnish
  • 2 tbsp. Honey + ¼ cup Hot Water — mixed together (honey syrup)
  • ¼ cup Straw­berry Jam + 1 tbsp. Hot Water — mixed together (I used home­made — def­i­nitely made a dif­fer­ence in taste)

Method:

Génoise Sponge Cake:

  1. Pre­heat oven to 350°F/180°C. Pre­pare a 7″ cake pan — line only the bot­tom with parch­ment paper.
  2. Sift flour and melt butter.
  3. Break eggs in a medium sized mix­ing bowl and whisk with sugar. Set eggs over a water bath (sim­mer­ing, NOT boil­ing) until the the eggs reach about body tem­per­a­ture, stir­ring occa­sion­ally — avoid cook­ing eggs so be care­ful not to have the heat too high.
  4. Mix with an elec­tric mixer or on a stand mixer on high speed until increases in vol­ume and becomes a creamy colour. *Impor­tant*: con­tinue beat­ing eggs on medium speed until eggs reach a “rib­bon” stage (test­ing with a whisk, draw the mix­ture up, away from the bowl and allow it to flow back to the mix­ing bowl, if it looks like you can almost write let­ters in the mix­ture with­out it being too runny then it has reached the “rib­bon” stage). It is dif­fi­cult to describe in words so I might con­sider doc­u­ment­ing the whole process in another post. :)
  5. Add in sifted flour and FOLD in flour with a rub­ber spat­ula until just mixed in. (try to do this in a fast motion and DO NOT over-mix)
  6. When flour is all mixed in, add but­ter + vanilla and FOLD until well mixed (DO NOT over-mix).
  7. Pour bat­ter into cake pan and tap the pan the counter to remove any big air bub­bles, bake right away in pre­heated oven for about 30 min­utes. Try not to open the oven door dur­ing the bak­ing process. The cake is done when a knife is inserted into the cen­tre and comes out clean.
  8. Cool cake, remove from pan — slide a par­ing knife around the pan and cake should come out eas­ily when pan is flipped over (metal knives are not rec­om­mended for “non-stick” pans).

Lay­er­ing:

  1. Beat whip­ping cream with sugar until firm peaks form. Chill in fridge until ready to use.
  2. Cut cooled cake into three even lay­ers. If the cake is shaped like a “dome” on top, cut off the excess to make a flat layer.
  3. Brush honey syrup onto the bot­tom two layers.
  4. Place straw­ber­ries on the bot­tom layer of cake and spread on whipped cream evenly, place sec­ond layer of cake on top.
  5. Spread straw­berry jam on cake and top with a thin layer of whipped cream.
  6. Coat the top and sides with remain­ing whipped cream.
  7. Pipe cream for dec­o­ra­tion (if desired — might require more cream). Gar­nish with straw­ber­ries and chopped pistachios.
  8. Chill until ready to serve.

It is not the best-looking cake but it is not bad. :P I didn’t take a pic­ture of the cross-section, I thought that it would be nice to see it in an illus­tra­tion. I didn’t sweeten the whipped cream too much because my mom is a not a big fan of overly sweet desserts. I also cut back on the cream (try­ing to be a tiny bit health­ier). The end result was VERY yummy, the cake had a rich egg flavour and the lay­ers had a very aro­matic straw­berry flavour — with fresh berries and the jam. Glad mom enjoyed it, she even had two pieces (she usu­ally stops at one).

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