Asian Fusion

Asian food. We all get it. Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Mongolian... But what about those other Asian countries? You know which ones I mean. I'm talking about Russia, Iraq, Egypt, and Kazakhstan. Why don't we order Egyptian cuisine on Christmas? Today really got me thinking about those cuisines which we don't honor when we talk about Asian cuisine. Poor guys.

You may be thinking that this post will honor the lesser known Asian cuisines. Wrong. We're gonna keep it traditional up in here. Maybe we'll talk about Borscht another time.

This morning we started with pot stickers. For those of you who don't know, but I know a few of you do (because we've made them together), pot stickers are Chinese dumplings. How did they come about, you ask?

Chinese dumplings are called guotie. Originally, the dumplings were boiled in a wok, the standard Chinese cooking pot. Legend has it that a Chinese chef boiled the dumplings but forgot about them while he was cleaning up, and when he returned to the wok, the water had boiled out and the dumplings were stuck to the wok. The result? Crispy, tender, delicious dumplings. And so, guoties were born. Guo, Chinese for Wok, and tie, for stuck.

We actually started our pot stickers by browning them first and then we moved to steaming. When I've made pot stickers in the past, I've used a skillet or a soup pot instead of a wok, simply because I don't have one at home (hint hint). A wok has a small bottom and wide sides, so you can only fry a few pot stickers at a time in there. In a skillet, your surface area is much bigger, so you can fry many at a time.

After we made the dough and the filling (ground chicken thighs, scallions, ginger, and spices), we made the dumplings, pinched the sides and started frying.

After the color developed and a few minutes passed, I threw in (a little too much) water. Chef says to put in about a cup, I probably did more and I think you probably need less than a cup. Maybe 3/4 cup. But who knows? Then I quickly covered it and let it steam for about 5 more minutes.

We served them with a mild dipping sauce and ate pot stickers at like 10:30 am. Pura vida.

Then we moved on to General Tso's chicken with fried rice. We marinated dark meat chicken tenders and then coated them in corn starch and deep fried them. We got some high temperature oil in a wok (hot wok, cold oil) and threw in some whole chili peppers. It was very cool actually, since the peppers weren't cut, they didn't give off an intense heat, but they flavored the oil just slightly to give the whole dish a little bit of a kick. We got the deeply fried chicken into more oil, because never too much oil, apparently. Poured some sauce in, added ginger and garlic, and finished it off with some scallions and bean sprouts.

The sauce had a great balance of sweet and salty. We even added some more soy sauce and sugar to intensify those flavors and the result was deliciousness.

Last dish of the day was Szechuan Beef with Lo Mein noodles. Szechuan is uber spicy. We took very tender meat, a surprise steak, and marinated that in dark soy sauce. I'd never worked with dark soy sauce before, it's thicker than regular soy sauce and tastes more like La Choy rather than Kikoman. We added chili oil, chili paste, garlic, ginger, and other spicy things so that it could live up to its name. We browned the meat first and set it aside, and then added sticks of carrot, celery, red and green pepper, put some spicy sauce on it, and added the beef back into the pan.

Tip of the day: When working with fried food, specifically deep fried, always have a wire rack on a sheet pan next to the stove. Take the fried food out with a skimmer or slotted spoon and put it on the wire rack so that any excess oil drips off. Paper towels are a popular choice when frying shnitzel and latkes, but if you want your food to stay crispy, put it on a wire rack. Even if you place on serving the food immediately after frying, do the rack thing for a minute or two and then serve.