Japanese Gyoza with Soy Dipping Sauce

I love gyoza  and always order them in Japanese or Chinese restaurants.  They are dumplings that can be steamed, fried or first fried and then steamed (potstickers).  Popular in Asia , the Japanese version known as gyoza and the Chinese version known as jiaozi.  They are, as you can imagine similar but use different filling are cooked slighly differently.  They are the Asian version of the Italian's ravioli.  The version we cooked was leaning towards the Japanese but I would say that we spun it a little with flavours more associated with Thai and it really worked.

We took a traditional recipe for Japanese gyoza - minced pork and cabbage being the main ingredients.  We added spring onion, coriander, ginger, garlic, fish sauce and lime juice and grated lime peel.  The dipping sauce was a mixture of Japanese rice wine and soy sauce although next time I would use Tamari which is the Japanese equivalent but we had run out annoyingly.

We also slightly cheated in that we had some wanton pastry in the freezer and whilst wanton pastry is different in that its slightly thicker it didn't seem to make a huge amount of difference.  The most notable was the wanton skins were square and smaller and the gyoza should be made from round so you can make crescent shaped dumplings.  The difference in the pastry is wanton pastry contains egg and as I said early is thicker, the remaing ingredients is water, wheat flour and salt.  So ignoring that fact we went ahead as we wanted to make them anyway as an experiment as paying £6 for 4 dumplings in a restaurant was good motivation to perfect the making of these delicious dumplings.

Ingredients
1 small sweatheart cabbage
6 spring onions
3 cloves garlic
250g pork mince
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 heaped tablespoon chopped coriander
1 lime grated peel
1 teaspoon lime juice
gyoza wrappers (although as I said we used wantons and they were fine)
1 egg white (to help stick the dumplings)
oil for frying

For the sauce
1 tablespoon Soy sauce
1 tablespoon Japanese rice wine

To start you need to finely chop and salt the cabbage with about 2 teaspoons of salt and really work into the cabbage.  Good old osmosis goes into action and the pile of sweatheart cabbage is stripped of all its water and, after 20 minutes, once you have given it a good squeeze in a cloth, you are left with a ball of chopped cabbage.  While this was going on you take the minced pork and add the finely chopped spring onion, chopped coriander, garlic and ginger, fish sauce and lime.

Once you have mix this up add the cabbage which will now have much of the water removed by the salt.  Mix this again so that its all mixed through and now start to fill the pastry.  With this amount of mixture you should be able to make around 40.  Each one has around two teaspoons worth of the mixture.

Once you have finished the dumplings add them to a pan and fry them until they are brown.  Some recipes say to just fry on one side - I didn't I fried both sides.  You then add about 200ml of boiling water and cover the pan so that the dumplings are cooked through.  You need to cook them until the water has evaporated and you are left with delicious gyoza.  Admittedly mine weren't going to win the shape award but they more than made up with the flavour - awesome!

Serve straight away with the dipping sauce...

Christmas 2010 (Chicken Liver Pate with Wild Mushrooms)

Flambéed Chicken Livers with Cognac

This is another really simple recipe and can be made whenever and used at your leisure.  It was always tradition with my mother to make a pate for consumption in between Christmas and New Year once the leftovers from Christmas day have been consumed and you need something to go with the last of the Stilton.  Obviously this dish can be made and used whenever as, just like dogs, it's not just for Christmas.  

Whether you buy fresh or frozen chicken livers it makes very little difference. You will need the following:

Ingredients

450g (1lb) chicken livers

5 rashes of pancetta
4 shallots
50 g of dried wild mushrooms
50ml of Cognac
1 teaspoon chopped fresh Thyme
Seasoning
40g butter
(50g butter for the top of the pate)

Finely chop the shallots, thyme and the pancetta and fry with some of the butter until cooked through but avoid browning them.  While you are doing this take the dried mushrooms and rehydrate these in boiling water.  Remove the fried shallots etc.and place in a mixing bowl.  Add the chicken livers (check them before hand there are now large veins attached) and cook these, leaving some of the pinkness in the middle and add half the Cognac and flambé.

Add the chicken livers to the mixing bowl and blend until a smooth paste.  If you want a very smooth pate then you can push through a sieve but as we are adding mushrooms to this I didn't bother.  Take the now hydrated mushrooms and take out any excessive moisture (kitchen roll will do) and add to the pan and fry with some butter and add to the blended pate and the remainder of the Cognac.

Finished Pate

Pour out the pate into a bowl of your choice or separate Ramekin dishes should you prefer and cover the top of the pate with butter (this should be clarified as this will keep longer and won't go rancid) so that none of the pate is exposed to the air.

We devoured this in between Christmas and New Year but as I said this isn't a dish for Christmas, this is very much a dish for any season or occasion.  If you want to jazz it up you could try putting a Sauternes jelly on top and serve in slices as a starter for a dinner party...

Christmas 2010 (Steak and Guinness Stew)

Well I have many good excuses for not keeping up with the blog as much as I had hoped for at the beginning of the year.  It has been a tough few months and what precious little time I have had to myself, sitting down again in front of the computer just didn't appeal.  That's not to say that I haven't been cooking as I have been cooking but not with the same sense of adventure, more about convenience cooking and tried and tested favourites.

Christmas however is a time for getting back into the kitchen.  It's a time when you have no alternative but to don that apron and start amassing the dishes necessary to make for a good Christmas.  There are several days to provide for and not just that but all the 'down-time' eating that is as essential to the Festive period as the main meals themselves.

The stew reducing on the hob

We had divided up the responsibilities for Christmas amongst the family/families.  We were having the in-laws round on Christmas Eve (Lisa's family) and due at my father's in the morning.  Christmas Eve dinner is a tricky one.  You want something that is worthy of an occasion, simple in that it doesn't take up too much time and also nor excessively rich seeing as this is the first evening in a long run of potentially heart attack inducing meals.  The obvious choice, especially with the Irish Connection, a good old fashioned Beef and Guinness stew with added puff pastry lids, served with creamy mashed potato and Savoy cabbage.

As with all good stews it has to be made the day before it's eaten.  This is a very simple recipe and requires very little in the way of skill.  Provided you can you use a knife you can make this dish.

Ingredients for 6 people
2lb of stewing steak (remove any sinews, keep the white fat)
1lb of mushrooms
1/2lb of lardons
2 heaped table spoons of tomato purée
1 bouquet garni
2 Bay leaves
1 pint of beef stock
4 large carrots in batons
2 sticks of celery batons
2 large onions cut into 1/8ths
2 cans of Guinness (2 pints roughly)
Seasoning
1 teaspoon of brown sugar

Once you have trimmed the meat and cut the vegetables up you add everything to the pot at the same time, no need to brown the meat and fry the onions.  I also added the juice left over from re-hydrating the Ceps (Porcini Mushrooms) and Slippery Jacks (which I had picked in the Autumn in Devon) which were going to be used in the pate I was going to make next.  You preheat the oven and add the dish.  This is cooked for about 3 hours on a relatively low heat of around 160 degrees.

The tomato and the lardons give this recipe a really rich finish, perhaps a little French influence to a British dish but the resulting depth of flavour is well worth it.

When it comes to eating, reheat on the hob without the lid and reduce the liquid content so you have a more intense flavour and reduce the amount of liquid to get the sauce to the right consistency.  Now you can either put in a pie dish and add a pastry lid or serve as a stew.