DIM SUM!!

WOW!!  Our most elaborate attempt at foreign cooking yet.  The original intent was to try out a new Chinese restaraunt that's supposed to be good, but the library had a book called Dim Sum with pictures and recipies and I lost all control.  Yesterday's dinner menu was: rice, crab dumplings, potstickers, orange meatballs, scallion pancakes, stuffed mushrooms, and stuffed bao bread all made from scratch! Dave and Catherine were drafted naturally, and we are all proud of ourselves.   We hung a Chinese lantern (50 cents at a yard sale), turned on some Chinese pop music from the internet, Catherine and I stuck chopsticks in our hair and we had a feast. 

To my immense delight none of these dishes was very hard.  I picked them out with an eye toward spending the least possible money on weird sauces that we would never eat again and discovered that it was possible to feast on the cheap.  To take this item by item:

Rice-duh.
Potstickers---The scary thing here was making the wrappers.  The recipe is 3/4 cup flour 1/3 cup water.  I just couldn't believe it would work.  I ate some mighty tough tortillas based on the same idea.  It works FINE! I divided up the dough in 24 portions as recommeded, which forced me to roll the wrappers very thin and enabled me to do the fancy pleating and everything.  Result was surprisingly professional--although I wonder how many hundreds of potstickers a real Chinese cook could make in the time it took me to make 24.  Filling was basically pork, scallions and cabbage--first fry lightly in oil then add water and cover.

Crab Dumplings--wrappers the same as the potstickers with the addition of a little spinach.  Filling was cooked shrimp lump crab.  These are steamed for 10 minutes.

Orange meatballs--yum--they're supposed to be steamed, but we only have one small steamer--so we baked them--ground beef, orange peel, oyster sauce are main ingredients. 

Bao Bread--possibly my favorite discovery.  A simple yeast bread dough--then roll out in 3 inch circles--stuff with a pork filling--gather at the top to close, fry briefly and then steam.  Simply terrific texture.  Must try again because I burned the bottoms slightly.

Scallion pancakes--another flour based dough make the dough, roll, sprinkle scallions, fold up in a fancy Chinese tube then squish tube and roll again into pancake shape--fry.

Stuffed mushrooms--again pork filling and again a bit of frying and then steaming.

Time-wise--not something I'd want to do everyday--about an hour to make the fillings on Saturday and then about three hours on Sunday to put everything together and cook it.  Would go much faster next time now that we have an idea.  Still, loads of fun and since our kitchen is tiny we got to enjoy some real Chinese style crowding too.