SuzySushi

I did it! One batch of siu mai made (and mostly eaten for dinner! LOL!). I used a recipe for classic pork-and-shrimp siu mai that I've used before. I've had it so many years that I'm no longer sure where it originally came from, but I think it was from an early Eileen Yin-Fa Lo cookbook. Picture show is here. (I didn't realize the photos would upload in reverse order, so start at the bottom. If you wish to view the steps as a slide show, click "ascending" order.) The filling was delicious, as always, and the siu mai were easy to make. However, I used ready-made gyoza skins and would not buy that brand again -- they were too thick and doughy. (It was the only brand available at my local supermarket. Next time I'll go further afield to an Asian market where I have a choice of brands.) My husband and I each ate six of them, with a side of chilled asparagus; my 8 year old daughter and a friend of hers could only manage four each! I froze the leftovers for a future meal. Tomorrow I'm planning to make more siu mai with my other choice of filling, eggplant in black bean sauce. If I have time, I'll go to another market for the skins. I'm also planning to make another dim sum dish with the rest of the package of ground pork: steamed pork balls with cilantro. P.S. Inadvertently, this turned out to be a real Chinese day: earlier in the day, we were downtown and stopped at a Chinese bakery for fruit cakes (similar to moon cakes, but smaller) and a selection of dried fruits & vegetables (kumquats, lotus root, ginger, sweet potatoes)...

Sounds like a fast production method! I'm eager to see the finished products!

Here's a link to the website of Huy Fong Foods, which makes the rooster-logo sriracha sauce (the real thing -- many imitators out there)

When I've bought dan tat for takeout, they've been in little foil pie pans & look like the pastry was rolled out the cut with a fluted biscuit cutter.

I don't see why not... I'll press the pastry about halfway up the sides to compensate for the greater depth. They might be a little harder to unmold than individual tins, but the recipe I have calls for lining up the individual tins on a baking sheet anyway. Can't hurt to try it! That'll be my experiment, anyway.

I have a bunch of fluted tins that are too small for the recipe (more like candy tins!) and others that are too large and sloped (mini brioche pans). I think I'm going to use my muffin pans! Okay, so they aren't fluted, but I can put the finished products into cupcake papers and they'll look reasonably like the real thing.

I'd suspect that's true. I like bamboo steamers because they add fragrance to the foods (and look attractive to bring to the table). Another trick to prevent condensation, btw, is to wrap a tea towel around the underside of the lid of a pan, fastening it on top with a rubber band or twist-tie so it doesn't hang down onto the burner.

Cook the whole thing. Corned beef shrinks considerably when cooked. And a tip from me: Trim off excess fat and rinse the corned beef to remove some of the salt. Bring the corned beef to a boil in water to cover, then dump the water & the scum. Return the corned beef to the pan and add 2 12-ounce bottles of beer (I like ale, but you can even use Guinness) and the seasoning packet. Bring to a boil, then simmer, covered, 1-1/2 hours. Add cut-up onions, potatoes, and carrots. Simmer about 1-1/2 hours longer. It will be the best corned beef you've ever tasted!

I'm not sure the eggplant is traditional Chinese... I wish I could remember the name of the cookbook! It had recipes from a lot of different cultures, and what tied them together was the bold seasonings. A couple of my Chinese cookbooks have recipes for siu mai stuffed with glutinous rice. Wei-Chuan's dim dum cookbook calls them "pearl siu mai."

Sheesh! Is nothing sacred? Excessive consumption of almost anything can cause obesity... It would have been more useful if the report divided dim sum into steamed vs. fried items, for instance.

Okay, I'll be making siu mai over the weekend. Two different fillings. One is a recipe using shrimp & ground pork that I've used before. The other is eggplant siu mai, a recipe I copied down many years ago from a cookbook I borrowed from the library (and didn't note the name of!). The eggplant is cooked in black bean sauce and, now that I read it over, the instructions seem to specify too short a steaming time. It will be a real experiment!

Another love to the chocolate boxes!!! You keep saying your work is boring and ordinary, but I think your creations are anything but! Lucky club members to have access to your extraordinary desserts!

On one of our trips to Paris, we dined at a Senegalese restaurant called Paris-Dakar (10e, near Gare du Nord). I remember trying and being impressed by Tieppe Bou Dienne, a complex fish-and-rice dish. A friend also took us to several Moroccan restaurants, but I don't remember their names... The food at the Mosque de Paris is also quite good, and the dining room and outdoor tea room are exquisite. (Go for lunch or tea, and see it in the sunny daylight.)

I'm more a "prep as you go" cook & baker. I read over the recipe beforehand to make sure I have everything in the house, but rarely bother with a formal mise. Ingredients to be peeled, chopped, etc. get peeled and chopped first, then left in different sections of the cutting board(s) or placed in different sections on one or two large plates. Ingredients to be added together get measured and dumped into one bowl to add at the same time, or, if vegetables need to be added at different cooking times, the ones to be added last will go at the bottom of the bowl, and those that need the longest cooking time will be the top layer. It works for me.

Oh, and if you're into sweet liqueurs, try Chouchen, the Breton version of mead. I can't recommend a brand because the best one we had was homemade. Most creperies sell it by the glass, along with cidre.

Those bunnies are fantastic!!!! Did you use cake molds, or cut & piece them together?

WOW!!! Did that taste as great as it looks???

Josselin is a very pretty (if touristy) town with half-timbered houses and shops. I remember we had some very good seafood crepes there at a creperie just off the main square (it was a long time ago & I don't remember the restaurant's name). Besides crepes and straight seafood, other foods Brittany is famous for are Cotriade, a fish chowder, and shortbread-like butter cookies (sables, with an accent, sah-BLEZ), the best-known of which are tins of Le Galettes de Pont Aven, made in the town of Pont Aven. The southern part of Brittany is also famous for its seacoast and for its megaliths to rival Stonehenge; one famous site is Carnac.

Let me start out by saying that I don't remember ever eating curry on my trips to the UK (although I had to try the "haggis pakoras" in a trendy pub in Glasgow, Scotland)... but a similar question I've often answered for readers of a newsletter I do is "What gives Chinese foods that 'Chinese restaurant taste'?" My answer to the latter question is: it's the temperature of the wok (restaurant stoves heat MUCH hotter than those in typical home kitchens) plus the type of oil used (peanut). The closest way to replicate that flavor at home, I've found, is to stir-fry some scallion greens till almost burnt while stir-frying the garlic & ginger. Another "secret ingredient" in Chinese restaurant food is a dash of oyster sauce, even in dishes that are not described as being sauced with oyster sauce. The temperature & type of oil used may have a lot to do with the "Indian restaurant taste" you're seeking.

It sure looks like glutinous rice....

My daughter was a very adventurous eater until she was 3, then turned picky and is still in the picky stage at age 8. She went through a lo-o-o-o-o-ng "white food" stage when the only foods she would eat were white: white bread or rolls (no crusts), bagels (the insides only), white rice, ramen (God forbid there was a fleck of parsley in it), spaghetti with Parmesan cheese (no sauce), mashed potatoes, white meat chicken. She also ate fruit and guzzled milk. Her pediatrician advised us to just go with the flow... to not have a fight over foods so she wouldn't have eating issues later. Now she's learning about nutrition in school (she didn't want to hear it from us!) and is more willing to try new things. The other day, she even discovered she liked cilantro! I still don't make an issue of food and plan *her* meals around what she'll eat. That sometimes means making a partly separate meal for her. For instance, she won't eat fish except tuna sushi or smoked salmon, so if my husband and I are eating fish for dinner, I'll make her chicken tenders. She still won't eat sauce on pasta, so hers goes on her dish "plain" before I finish cooking the dish for the rest of us. Vegetables are still a problem. She'll eat carrots, broccoli ("baby trees"), and occasionally peas, but few others (oh, for the toddler days when she picked up asparagus spears with her little fingers!). I make her try "one taste" of other vegetables, but she usually politely refuses more. One day, I figure, she'll come around.

Completely different, and unlike any other rice I've ever eaten. It looks like a medium-grain rice with plump grains, but the grains are distinct when cooked. It's very fragrant, with a nutty flavor, and a chewy texture like that of brown rice. My daughter put soy sauce on hers, but my husband and I didn't feel we needed to add anything (the rice was cooked in water with a pinch of salt). It's a true rice, grown in China in iron-rich earth (which is partly where it gets its purplish black color) and supposedly was reserved for the Emperor. I don't know if that's just a marketing gimmick... black glutinous rice is fairly common in Southeast Asia, mostly in sweet dishes.

Lamb kabobs marinated in a blend of tarragon mustard, soy sauce, and lemon juice. Glazed Vichy-style carrots. "Forbidden" black rice. A delicious, colorful meal but I had the dropsies today -- a kitchen knife missed my toes by inches, and two cooking spoons hit the floor before I was done -- then a pair of tongs jammed in a drawer when I tried to pull the drawer out, and when I opened the oven door to take the meat out of the broiler, the corner of the oven door hit & took a chip out of the drawer panel. Not my day, so no photos.

Seems to me there's been a lot of strong seismic activity along the whole Asian side of the Pacific Rim, from the December tsunami in Indonesia on northwards...

Oh, yes! AU spatchcock = a small chicken; Cornish hen is the closest equivalent AU capsicum = bell pepper or chile pepper (you have to figure which one out from the recipe) AU rocket = arugala