OHHH! A good topic! To all the Asian people here! (Food!)

Are you sure you want to know?

 

Go to the local China town, buy the frozen dumplings there inside the super market, try out diffent brand/flavor to find the one u like and stick to it.

Fried rice, get cooked rice, put soy sauce and eggs, stir fry. The amount of soy sauce takes some trial and error, but you'll eventually get the feel for it. Also good in it are peas and maybe some meat.

Both are pretty easy to make, I learned how to do it when I was like 12 since my parents weren't home all the time at that point of my life.

 

dumplings from scratch isn't all that easy.

but you can buy dumpling wrappers. then you make a filling...easy enough to find a recipe. You wrap them; easy if someone shows you. Then use a heavy skillet...1/4 hot oil...fry them in place till brown on the bottom...quickly pour in some chicken stock to half-way up the dumplings, get to boil and partially cover and steam until the chicken stock is gone.

you do this at hot tempatures.

this is crunchy on the bottom and steamed the rest of the way.

pot stickers.

lovely

 

i meant to type 1/4 inch of hot oil.

 

"I spent the next three years in a POW camp, forced to subsist on a thin stew of fish, vegetables, prawns, coconut milk, and four kinds of rice. I came close to madness trying to find it here in the States, but they just can't get the spices right."

 

For fried rice, the key is to leave the cooked rice in your refrigerator overnight and let it become "dry".

 

Fatty, the Dumpling filling and wrapper recipes are easy to search for. The wrapper is fairly easy to make from scratch in a "dough-making" kinda way. It's just laborious to roll it really thin to make a lot. Make no mistake, fresh dough makes a difference. The filling is just a matter of marinating it right and fresh ingredients, many of which require going to Asian markets. The filling recipes are abundant.

The dipping sauce recipes are abundant too, but I find them needing a taste test and adjustments.

The key to dumplings is good chicken stock and fast cooking techniques. You really need an iron skillet.

 

use edit dummy!!

and go to bed

 

He'd love to, but the edit gets flipped on and off like a light switch...Clutch is having fun torturing us like that.

 

hey Fatty, I just realized I had a bookmark of the best explanation of pot stickers I found when searching over Christmas for a good recipe to use at a New Years Eve party.

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~yuie/dumplings.html

this is great with many pictures. This is the recipe I used and can vouche for it. Although I did make my own sauce and toyed with the filling recipe she uses.

this is a lovely picture:

<img src="http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~yuie/dumplings/fry3_4-01.jpg">

one thing she does not say is that if you do make a whole bunch from scratch and refrigerate them as you pile them up...don't let them touch each other in the frig, and use parchment paper to put them on. A frig can have a tendency to make the dough soggy from condensation.

 

Dude,

just go to the Park shops downtown (near houston center, Four seasons hotel). There is a dumpling shop (I believe called Doozoo's or something similar to that).

Legend has it, that the place used to be a yogurt shop that sold dumplings on the side. The dumplings became so popular, that now its a full fledged dumpling shop. Only open at lunch time and the lines can be long. I remember being on a project in Htown and skipping breakfast so I could eat more of their spinach dumplings. I've only had the steamed ones, but everyone seems to like all the other ones too.

 

Yeah that place has ridiculous lines at lunch.

 

The secret to Chinese cooking is ........


MSG

 

Look for "siu mai" (or a similar spelling since it is phonetic) if you want good pork/shrimp dumplings...steamed, not fried.

heyp is right - dumplings from scratch are not really hard, they just take a while because of the dough...it is worth it, though, because then you can dictate how thick/thin you want them to be. Dipping sauce is fairly simple - find the right combo between white vinegar, soy sauce, crushed garlic, sambal oelek (if you want to add green onion and a little sesame il, some people do).

Fried rice - definitely, as newgirl said, refrigerate it overnight. The key during cooking is speed and "feel," and is really hard to explain. My father-in-law's fired rice is amazing. Ask him for the recipe and he will basically say "you just put it all together and cook it" (which, by the way, is his recipe for everything).

There is too much variety in both to give one "best" recipe.

 

I made some dumplings this past weekend with a real simple filling that turned out surprisingly good. I used my wife's Cuisinart mini-chopper and threw in about a half pound of raw, shelled and deveined shrimp, a few slices of fresh ginger (with the tough outer layer removed, of course), about 2 teaspoons of sesame oil, and a raw egg. After I had processed it until it was damn near smooth (by the time the ginger is all processed, the shrimp are completely broken down), I folded in some minced green onion. I seem to recall throwing in a bit of salt too.

They tasted awesome!

The mix tasted just as good as the wonton filling for some wonton soup.

Unfortunately, my measurements aren't exact....they never are as I never do the same thing twice.