I was flipping through a wonderful cookbook I won at TECHmunch from Jaden Hair from SteamyKitchen.com. Her book, The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook is very engaging! I usually get bored with cookbooks as most of them do not have enough pictures. Jaden, who called herself a very visual person during her talk at TECHmunch, has proved herself so through all the glorious pictures of her dishes in her cook book. And! And, she has a copious amount of pictures from her own life. When I stumbled on her recipe for pork & mango pan fried dumplings, I immediately thought of my friend, Jamie.
98 percent of the meals I eat with Jamie are Asian. 100 percent of those times she orders pan fried dumplings. Inspired, I wanted to organized a cooking date with her which morphed into a cooking dinner party! We chose another recipe from the cookbook, a simple and easy Shrimp Fried Rice. Now, my momma makes the best fried rice anything. Being a bad daughter, I never really took the time to learn my mom’s recipes when I actually lived at home in Houston. Jamie chose this recipe because the few times she made fried rice before has been disastrous. I figured, I can practice my fried rice making skills.
Jamie learned that you’re supposed to use chilled leftover rice, something she hasn’t done previously. I learned the hard way a few years back. Using freshly cooked rice would make for a very mushy soggy fried rice. So here’s a tip in case you don’t have leftover rice, given to me by my mom. First, she lectured me on even making fried rice without leftover rice. Second, she said if need be, you can make fresh rice but skimp out on some of the water. If you’re using a rice cooker, fill the water 1 to .75 BELOW your normal amount of water. This will have the rice cooked a little dehydrated, combating the soggy rice syndrome. This is what we did on Sunday and it worked out perfectly!
Jamie, Judy, Charlotte, and I had a dumpling assembly station. It was amusing to see the different ways we wrapped our dumplings. The extra bunched up ones were Jamie’s. At the end of his blog entry I have a link to Steamy Kitchen’s dumpling tutorial.
After we wrapped all the dumplings, we handed them off to our token male to fry. I told him to pan fry them but uh, he deep fried instead. We didn’t stop him. It’s hard for me to walk away from deep fried anything in my life.
While William fried, Jamie and I tackled the very easy fried rice. Recipe linked at the end of this post. William took notes as he’s always wanted to learn how to make fried rice.
Everything turned out wonderfully! Even if we kind of strayed from the recipe and deep fried our little cute dumplings. We were happy people.
Recipes can be found in her cookbook and I was nosy and found them on her blog.
– Steamy Kitchen’s Shrimp Fried Rice
– This isn’t exactly the recipe from her book but it’s similar (add a mango!) and has her wonderful tutorial on how to fold dumplings.
Possibly Related Blog Posts (automatically generated)