The Dinner Files

We had our first day of school in the San Francisco public schools last week. It seemed early in theory, but just about right in practice. I was ready to have the predictable schedule of school back in our lives. My son didn’t necessarily agree, but was excited to see his friends. He was also excited when I told him that we could make dumplings for dinner.

Ernest’s favorite foods are dim sum, sushi, tacos, and pizza (plain cheese pizza, he would emphasize while holding up his index finger in a way that reminds me of my grandmother making an important point). As with fried chicken and mac-n-cheese, he was deeeee-lighted to learn that we could actually make dumplings right here in our own kitchen.

Unlike our other adventures of making food he usually only gets when we’re out, we did and will be making dumplings again. Ernest got so into helping make the dumplings that when we made them again on Sunday (and my dashing husband got his hands dirty, too) we had them done – start to finish – in less than 30 minutes.* (The first round took a bit longer simply because the filling included Swiss chard which required cooking down before turning into the filling.)

Pork and Swiss chard dumplings

These dumplings are fairly quick and very easy to pull together. Yes, the pork cooks when you boil the dumplings.

1 bunch Swiss chard

2 scallions

1 tablespoon freshly shredded ginger

1 tablespoon dry sherry or rice wine

1 teaspoon soy sauce

1 teaspoon chili oil

1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

1/3 pound ground pork

about 40 won ton wrappers

Rinse Swiss chard leaves until clean. Cut out the white stems from the Swiss chard leaves. Finely chop the stems. In a large frying pan over medium high heat, cook the chopped stems with a tablespoon of water. Cover and cook until tender, about 5 minutes. Add leaves, cover, and cook until leaves are completely wilted. Transfer leaves and stems to a cutting board – carefully leaving any liquid in the pan behind – and let sit until a bit cooled off. Addendum: You need to remove as much liquid still in the chard as you can. There are several ways to do this: put chard in a fine mesh sieve and press on it with a spoon, put chard in a clean kitchen towel or layers of paper towels and squeeze it, or simply pick up the chard in small handfuls and squeeze the liquid out. Whichever method you use, try not to think of all the tasty vitamins and whatnot going down the drain. The supreme texture and loveliness of the dumplings will comfort you soon. Finely chop the chard and transfer to a medium bowl.

Finely chop the scallions and add to chard. Add ginger, sherry, soy sauce, chili oil, and sesame oil. Use your hands to combine everything. Add the pork and, again, use your hands to gently mix the ingredients together.

When you start, just work with four to six wrappers at once. When you get going, though, you can lay out a dozen at a time. Set up your filling station with a clean work surface, a small bowl of water, a spot for the bowl of filling, and a large baking sheet sprinkled with cornstarch.

Note: If you plan to cook them right after making them, you might as well put on a large pot of water to boil now.

Lay out four to six won ton wrappers on the work surface.

Dot the center of each one with about a teaspoon of filling.

Use your fingers (or a pastry brush, I suppose, if you like to clean things) to wet the edges of the wrappers. This is a very important step because the water is what will allow you to seal the wrapper shut, so don’t skimp!

Now fold one corner over the filling to its opposite corner to make a triangle and use your fingers to firmly press the edges together and seal them.

Now pull up the two corners that are farthest away from each other and press them together to seal them.

Voila!

Set this dumpling on the cornstarch-sprinkled tray and make three to four dozen more.

(These were made using the technique of bringing up all four corners to the center and sealing the edges; a method that we found 1) trickier and 2) not as attractive after boiling.)

When ready to cook, make sure the pot of boiling water is well salted and put the dumplings in somewhat gently. Boil, stirring gently now and again, until cooked through, about 3 minutes.

While they boil, move the baking sheet on which you held them next to the stovetop and put a cooling rack over it. Drain the dumplings by lifting them out of the water with a slotted spoon and placing them on the cooling rack.

Transfer to shallow bowls. Serve with soy sauce, chili oil, or whatever sounds yummy to you. We ate ours with a sauce of 2 cloves minced garlic, 2 tablespoons soy sauce, 3 tablespoons chili oil, and 1 tablespoon vegetable oil and topped with minced cilantro.

We have a lot of ideas floating around our house for future dumpling fillings these days. I’d love to hear yours.

* The Sunday dumplings had a shrimp and chive filling. Pulse 1 pound shelled raw shrimp (I used some great wild-caught Florida pink shrimp that were wonderfully flavorful) and 3 bunches chives in a food processor. Then fill dumplings as above – seriously it is just that simple and crazy delicious.

Last week, before the lefse extravaganza, one of my other San Francisco Bay Area cousins (the Watson cousins have a quorum going – four out of seven of us live in the Bay Area; if you count Monterey, which is a questionable move, the number goes to five out of seven – impressive considering not a single one of us is from here) stopped by after work to make samosas. Why samosas? We really don’t know. I taught her how to make gougères last fall (for her book club meeting when they were to discuss My Life in France – the inspirational tale of Julia Child’s time in France, including embarking on her culinary career at the tender age of 37) and we had a rollicking good time and wanted to do it again.

So we made 110 samosas. I mean, if you’re going to get a pan of oil bubbling and pull out the rolling pins out and cover the kitchen in flour, you might as well have something to show for it at the end of the day, no?

First, the fillings. One potato. One lamb. I make no claims to even the remotest authenticity. We didn’t even fill them right. We gave up and filled them like ravioli or pierogi.

Potato Samosa Filling

This is what most people think of when they think “samosa” (or, I suppose, if they think “samosa”). This filling was soft and fluffy lightly spiced and full of little seeds – cumin, fennel, and mustard – to give it plenty of flavor. If you want to make them more like samosas you get at most Indian restaurants in the States, throw in about a cup of frozen peas towards the end.

4 large Yukon Gold potatoes

Salt

1 large onion, chopped

2 Tablespoons vegetable oil

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

1 teaspoon mustard seeds

3 dried small red chiles

10 fenugreek seeds

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

1 Tablespoon lemon juice, plus more to taste

Put potatoes in a large pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil and add about a tablespoon of salt – you want the water to actually taste salty. Cook until potatoes are tender all the way through, 20 to 30 minutes.

Put potatoes through a ricer or peel and chop – the choice is yours. My cousin “chopped” ours into a mash. It was all very even and precise. She’s a lawyer.

Meanwhile, you can heat another pan over high heat and cook the onions in the oil until they start to brown , adjusting the heat so they don’t burn before they soften. Or, do as we did and wait for that potato pot to be drained and use it to avoid washing a pot. Yes, I’m that lazy about washing dishes.

When the onions are starting to brown, increase heat to high if necessary and add the cumin seeds, fennel seeds, and mustard seeds. Cover and cook until the mustard seeds stop popping, about 2 minutes.

Add chiles, fenugreek seeds, and turmeric. Stir to combine and then stir in the cooked chopped or mashed potatoes. Cook, stirring, to keep potatoes from sticking too much to the pan (they’ll come up when you add the lemon juice in a moment, so there’s no need to panic), until flavors blend a bit, about 5 minutes. Add salt to taste if needed and drizzle whole mixture with lemon juice. Stir to pick up bits of potato on bottom of the pan and transfer to a bowl to cool a bit.

Lamb Samosa Filling

This is essentially kheema, a spiced ground meat dish that goes with rice or bread or potatoes and makes a great stuffing for vegetables that can be stuffed.

1 Tablespoon vegetable oil

2 large onions, chopped

6 cloves garlic, minced

2-inch piece of fresh ginger, grated

1 1/2 pounds ground lamb

6 whole cloves

6 black peppercorns

2 bay leaves

3 dried red hot chiles

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon

3 chopped tomatoes (fresh or canned)

1/2 teaspoon salt

Lemon juice

In a large frying pan or pot, heat oil over medium high heat. Add onions and cook, stirring, until soft, about 3 minutes. Add garlic and ginger and cook, stirring, until very fragrant, about 1 minute. Add lamb and cook, stirring as you see fit, until cooked through. Add cloves, peppercorns, bay leaves, chiles, coriander, cumin, turmeric, and cinnamon. Stir to combine. Stir in tomato, salt, and 1/2 cup water. Cover, reduce heat to maintain a simmer, and cook for about 45 minutes. Remove cover, taste and add more salt if you like, and cook off any remaining liquid. Stir in lemon juice and transfer to a bowl to cool.

You will notice that the potato and lamb samosas look quite different on their outsides and well as their ins. We baked the lamb ones – since they had plenty of unctuous tasty fat in them to keep them moist anyway.

So, onto the dough (tired yet?). Use your fingers to work 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil into 2 cups whole wheat pastry flour mixed with 1/2 teaspoon salt. Stir in 1/2 cup water. You may need to add another 1/4 cup to make a workable dough. Knead it in the bowl until it holds together as a ball. Cut into 20 – 30 pieces and cover with plastic wrap or a damp kitchen towel. Work with one ball at a time.

On a floured work surface roll each ball into a 4-inch circle. Cut the circle in half. Now you can fold the half-circle in half and pinch the cut sides together to form a cone for a traditional samosa shape and fill the cone about 3/4 full of filling and then crimp the end shut, or just fill it and crimp the edges as we ended up doing because we were so tired and lacked proper Bengali skills. Place filled samosas on a lightly floured baking sheet.

When you’re ready to cook you can either bake them for about 20 minutes in a 375 oven and/or heat about 1/2 inch of vegetable oil in a heavy pot or cast iron pan over medium high heat to 350 – 375 degrees. Fry, in batches and without crowding the samosas – until golden on each side, about 3 minutes per side. Drain on paper towels or a cooling rack.

We were total heathens who just shoved them in our mouths as we went. I really just do not want to think about how many we ate as we filled and fried. A lot. We officially ate a whole butt-load of samosas. And then some. Luckily, I had made a cilantro mint chutney. It’s chock-full of vitamin A.

After all the crazy, off-the-cuff potato gnocchi-making I’ve engaged in this fall, I decided to branch out. To sweet potato gnocchi. It works pretty much the same as regular potato gnocchi, except the dough never took on that playdough quality and stayed quite soft/tender/flour-hogging. Part of the reason for that is that the sweet potato is an entirely different vegetables, I’m sure, but the fact that the sweet potatoes I used were gigantic and so I peeled and cut them in order to boil them surely didn’t help – they probably soaked up a fair amount of water while cooking. Next time I might try just roasting the sweet potatoes whole….

Due to pantry shortages, I used whole wheat pastry flour instead of all purpose flour. It worked great. I’ve found these two flours can be used completely interchangeably in almost any recipe. Still, that it worked so well in gnocchi sort of shocked me.

Sweet potato gnocchi

Easy as homemade gnocchi are, they aren’t as easy as pulling something out of the freezer, so I made a large batch – half to eat that night, half to freeze for future. The entire batch makes about eight reasonable servings, servings that leave me plenty full. That said, I really have no idea how much you eat. This “large” batch may be just the right amount for your family of four. Then again, you might find it serves 12. It also depends on how you serve them: Just coated with a bit of brown butter or doused in cheese sauce? Sauteed with a few veggies or topped with ragu?

Note: To freeze simply lay shaped gnocchi on a baking sheet in a single layer and put in the freezer for a few hours or overnight. Once frozen, transfer to an airtight container or ziploc bag. When you’re ready to cook them, just pop them in the boiling water. They’ll take a minute or two longer to cook than do the fresh ones.

2 lbs. sweet potatoes

1 Tbsp. salt (for cooking water)

2 – 2 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour or all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling and shaping

1 egg

Peel sweet potatoes and cut into even-sized pieces. Put sweet potato chunks in a large pot and cover with cool water. Bring to a boil, add salt, and cook until sweet potatoes are very tender when pierced with a fork (try to limit your check-ins, you don’t want them taking up even more water than they already will). Drain sweet potatoes and return to the still-hot pot. Put them back on the stove over low heat and shake to help evaporate excess water.

Mash sweet potatoes thoroughly. I find pushing them through a ricer is the best way, but a large fork or potato masher works just fine, too. Stir in 2 cups of flour, 1 cup at a time.

If you’re cooking a batch of gnocchi, bring a large pot of water to a boil. If you’re going to freeze all the gnocchi, bring a small saucepan of water to a boil. Drop a spoonful of the batter into the boiling water. Stir and then let cook, undisturbed, until the “dumpling” floats to the surface. Let it continue cooking for 30 seconds before fishing it out. If it holds together, proceed with the recipe without adding the egg. If it falls apart, stir in the egg. The dough will separate and look weird. Do not panic. Instead, keep stirring. The dough will come back together, I promise.

Stir in the final 1/2 cup flour if the dough seems wet. If it seems like you could, with well-floured hands on a very well-floured surface, roll the dough into snakes and cut it into dumplings, turn it out onto a very well-floured surface. Divide the dough into four parts. Working with one part at a time, roll it into a 1-inch-thick snake and cut it into 1/2-inch dumplings. I found the dough too soft to really shape on a fork as one does with traditional potato gnocchi, but if you want to give it a try I’d love to hear about it! Put cut gnocchi on well-floured baking sheets. Put any amount you want to freeze in the freezer. Any gnocchi you plan to cook the same day simply cover loosely and leave in a cool spot until you’re ready to cook them.

To cook the gnocchi, bring a pot of salted water to a boil and cook the gnocchi as described for the sample – add to boiling water, stir, and let boil until they float to the surface, then let them cook 30 seconds more before lifting out of the water. Only cook as many gnocchi as will fit in a single layer when they float to the surface. Keep cooked gnocchi warm in a low oven, with a bit of melted butter or whatever sauce you plan on serving them with. I chose browned butter with a bit of sage and a few toasted walnuts. It was a solid, if unimaginative option.

I realize, I really and truly do, that most of you are not going to make your own potato gnocchi. I can see that it seems daunting. It seems messy. It seems like a lot of work. I suppose it is all of those things, in a way. But it’s all relative, isn’t it? The daunting, the messy, the time-consuming – these are the kitchen projects I like the best. And, as my dad once said, “The homemade kind is always better.”

We were having some friends over and I was trying to keep things quite simple. It was just another couple and us – we were only hosting because we couldn’t find a sitter. (I have found that there are two types of people that work well as dinner party friends when you have a school-age kid – people with similar school-age kids and people without any children at all.) They insisted on bringing a starter and wine and dessert, claiming we always host because of the sitter issue. I didn’t even put up a fight but tried to figure out a meal that wouldn’t suck up my entire day but would also use some of the potatoes from our CSA that have piled up a bit in the fridge.

I was brainstorming with the family and Ernest suggested gnocchi. Daunting, messy, and time-consuming? Not really that much since I already had some pesto in the fridge I had made so all I had to do was make the dumplings – and I’ve done that before and, in the end, it doesn’t take that much time (fair warning: so says the person who loves to do things in the kitchen).

So I boiled a pound and a half of yukon gold potatoes, starting them in a pot of cold water, adding a tablespoon of salt once the water was boiling, and avoided pricking them to test for doneness too terribly much lest the potatoes get waterlogged.

I drained them, donned a latex glove to protect my hand from the heat as I scraped the skin off each hot potato.

They were then pushed through a ricer (my favorite way to mash potatoes thoroughly and completely) and mixed with one and a half cups of flour.

This dough, still warm from the boiled potatoes, feels a lot like playdough and is quite fun to work with. I divided it into four and rolled out each quarter into an inch-thick snake on a very well floured surface.

This potato dough snake was then cut into bite-size pieces (a table knife works fine and reminds me of pre-school).

So far so easy, right? Next, to make the dumplings gnocchi-shaped, I simply took each little knob of dough and ran in down the tines of a fork, pushing it with my thumb so it ends up with the tine marks on one side and the thumbprint on the other. It takes a few dumplings to get the hang of it, but once you’ve figured out the motion you can gnocchify an entire batch of dumplings in less than five minutes.

The gnocchi were then laid out on a very well floured tray, covered with a clean towel and sat, waiting patiently, for their big moment to arrive.

The stage was set: Two big pots of water brought to a boil. Serving platter in warm oven. Water salted. Pesto brought to room temperature. A bit of the pesto spread on the serving platter. Bite-size pieces of green bean thrown in the water and cooked a few minutes before being fished out with a slotted spoon and put on the serving platter.

Then the gnocchi were added – half to each pot of water (otherwise cook in two batches). They sank right to the bottom of the pot and got a swift yet decisive stir. After about a minute they floated to the top of the water as were allowed to cook for about 10 seconds while they floated and then, like the green beans before them, they were lifted out of the water and onto the serving platter. Once all the gnocchi were out, the pesto was added and everything tossed. The platter was brought – triumphant – to the table with parmesan and a grater for each person to top their own.

Has is becoming my habit, a recipe -style recipe for Potato Gnocchi is over at Local Foods. Oh, and there’s one there for Pesto, too.

Yep, you read correctly. The last day of our New Mexico – Texas full-tilt chile, art, and UFO spring break road trip (about which I promise to write more in the very near future) fell on Ernest’s birthday. He is now 6. And we all know that the very least one can offer someone on their birthday is to decide what to have for dinner. Despite hints about succulent chicken tacos (“Mama, I eat tacos all of the time” was his response, which, as regular readers know, is true both in his daily home life and was most definitely a fact of meals on this road trip), the Birthday Boy wanted dim sum.

Of course he did. Dim sum is his favorite food. By a large margin, from what I can tell. And then he was such a good sport when we told him that it might not work out that I did what I could to track down dim sum in Albuquerque. There are, based on the limited research I could do as we drove in the rain and hail between art galleries (hey, do we know how to show a 6 year-old a good birthday time or what?) while I also tried to book a room at a hotel near the airport (6:51 am flight!) that had an indoor pool (birthday + rain = the least I could do), two places in Albuquerque to get dim sum: Amerasian Sumosushi and Ming Dynasty. Ming Dynasty had a definite edge in the online reviews, a more focused Chinese menu, and, let’s be honest, a much more appealing name.

You know what? Ming Dynasty is putting out some very serviceable dumplings. Some were a bit heavy, but the barbeque pork buns were light as a feather with an excellent filling-to-bun ratio and the sesame balls were crispy and fresh. The vegetable mu shu my dashing husband and I ordered to supplement our dinner (all the better to leave the lion’s share of dumplings for the Birthday Boy to inhale), was deftly assembled table-side with supremely tender house-made pancakes.

They were as good as any mu shu I’ve ever had. In fact, I can’t recall any better.

And I’d like to add that the service was delightful. Charming and kind and efficient. And very quick with that second order of har gow that they never saw coming… no one, not even dim sum resturant workers, can ever believe how much dim sum my boy can eat.

Did you have a happy Thanksgiving? Was the turkey moist? The pie flaky? The relatives well behaved?

We did not have the best Thanksgiving ever. That was last year. Last year I came down with pneumonia (pneumonia!) the weekend before Thanksgiving, causing us to cancel the festivities. My friend from high school who was scheduled to come for the weekend came anyway, figuring on keeping me company and/or helping with Ernie while I recuperated. The thing is, a few days into the anibiotics and steroids I was feeling much better. Not well enough to host Thanksgiving, but well enough to enjoy the company of my dashing husband and omnivorous son and the world’s best houseguest. I wasn’t up for cooking on Thanksgiving, so we got take out from our favorite Pakistani restaurant. The whole day was so fun and mellow that we declared it The Best Thanksgiving Ever. It was a fine example of extremely low expectations leading to great happiness.

But, as the saying goes, you can’t go home again. Since none of us care about turkey (well, my dashing husband adores it but, as previously mentioned, he is “trying” to be a vegetarian so torturing him with a turkey carcass to pick at for a few days seemed cruel). We were all tempted to just order the Pakistani food again, but my dashing husband inquired if there was some other way to celebrate Thanksgiving.

So I thought. And thought. I considered the time I would put into a traditional menu. I thought of what else I could make. What else I wanted to make. What I’d rather make. And then it came to me: manti.

Manti are teeny tiny Turkish dumplings filled with itsy bitsy morsels of lamb, baked, covered with broth and baked some more. They are then drizzled (or drenched, your choice) with garlicky yogurt, brown butter, some chopped mint, and a sprinkle of ground chile. They are crazy delicious and an unbelievable amount of work. So I spent a few hours on Wednesday afternoon mixing the filling, kneading and rolling out the dough, and folding the tiny things closed before arranging them in a pan. I made them based on a recipe from Saveur, which got it from Nevin Halici’s Turkish Cookbook. 

I started by making chicken stock. Since I make it in giant batches in a canning kettle, I removed the 4 cups I would need for the dumplings and simmered that with a stick of cinnamon and a dozen whole peppercorns for 30 minutes.

Next step was making the dough, essentially a basic pasta dough of 1 2/3 cups flour, 1 tsp. salt, 2 eggs, and 1/4 cup water. Mix this until it forms a dough, then knead it, using extra flour as necessary (between the humid San Francisco November weather and the simmering broth turning my kitchen into a light steam room, I used a fair amount), until when you pinch a bit of it it feels like your earlobe, 5 to 10 minutes. Cover with plastic wrap and let rest at least 30 minutes and up to an hour.

While that rests, mix the filling. Just a half pound of ground lamb, a finely chopped small onion, about 2 Tbsp. minced flat-leaf parsley, 3/4 tsp. kosher salt, and 3/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper. Since that probably won’t take a full half hour, you can also generously butter a large baking pan (at least 10.5 x 12 or two smaller pans; you may want to have a smaller pan ready for extra just in case). 

Divide the dough into four pieces, roll one piece into as much of a square as you can manage about 1/8-inch thick. Cut into 1-inch squares, removing any uneven edges. Top each square with about 1/8 tsp. of the lamb mixture. Yes, these amounts are insanely tiny. Any yet these are the amounts, trust me.

Pick up a lamb-topped square and fold two opposite corners towards the center and pinch them to seal them together. Pull the other two corners up to the center and seal them. These corners need be sealed in the center top, but the sides do not need to be completely sealed. Place the sealed dumpling in the buttered baking pan (they need to be in a single layer, but you can have them in there pretty tight just not squished) and repeat with remaining dumplings. Then repeat with remaining dough. At some point you will feel like you are losing your mind. Make sure you have the radio on or perhaps a good friend on speaker phone. Or just get all zen-like and enjoy the mindless, repetative task at hand.

When they are all done and in the pan you can cover and chill for up to a day (as I did), or just go ahead with the recipe. Heat the oven to 400. Bake manti until golden, about 30 minutes. Bring the 4 cups broth to a boil and pour into pan, cover pan with foil, and continue baking until most of the liquid is absorbed, about 25 minutes.

While they are baking, mince or seriously smash up 3 cloves of garlic and mix it with 1 cup thick or strained yogurt and salt that to taste. Melt about 4 Tbsp. butter and cook until it starts to brown. Chop about 1/4 cup of fresh mint leaves. 

Divide dumplings between 4 to 6 shallow bowls, top each serving with yogurt, brown butter, mint, and some ground chile. Tradition/authenticity calls for urfa chile flakes. I found a mixture of ground arbol and ground ancho and a bit of ground sumac was pretty tasty. Just some red chile flakes would work just dandy, too. 

For dessert we had this beautiful baklava. I’m not going to give you the recipe, though, because I wasn’t so thrilled with it. The word I’m looking for just may be “disppointed.” It sure was pretty though:

In short, we had a Turkish dinner instead of a Turkey dinner.

Two days later, Ernie and I are beefed out. My dashing husband will come home to a household ready and willing to re-embrace his mainly-vegetarian ways.

On the way to school I asked Ernie, I asked him, “What should we have for dinner?”*

It was a loaded question. I knew the answer. Rather, I knew the two possible answers: dumplings or tortellini. And tortellini are just tiny little dumplings. My son comes by his love of dumplings honestly (a phrase, I must be note, that is horribly offensive because it clarifies that the person in question is not a bastard and demonstrates as much in having a characteristic clearly inherited from a biological parent…whatever) because I love nothing more than a bit of something wrapped in dough and fried, boiled, steamed, or baked. Hell, try grilling it if you want!

And so I went to Safeway and I bought him his beloved Barilla three-cheese tortellini. I was going to have a green salad and bread and cheese, but by the time dinner rolled around felt the need for a hot meal. So I tossed some weirdly dry but overcooked salty bits in very good Irish butter and poppyseeds and topped it with a pile of parmesan shredded on a microplane zester, creating a light and fluffy pile of cheese. You know what? It was not good. Ernie wolfed down his–plain (no butter! what are you trying to do? poison him?!?!) with just a touch of parm–and asked for more. There is no accounting for taste.

*After the tortellini answer, I asked what vegetable he would like with that. Answer: Farm carrots. Just plain farm carrots.