My little dumpling

I was watching Bobby Flay do a throw down on his show a few days ago and he challenged a Korean restaurant owner to a throw down making dumplings, pot-stickers, dim sum, rat tarts* or whatever you want to call them.

That used to be one of my son Jon's specialties. So of course, I had to scrounge up his recipe and make some of them yesterday for lunch. I got a few tips from the TV show, since I'd never made them myself before, I always just watched while Jon made them. Jon also made a dynamite sauce for them. Luckily I had both recipes and armed with them and the tips from the show, I gave it a go!

I had some Chinese garlic chives growing in my garden, and with some ground pork, crushed garlic, grated ginger, chopped onion, and a touch of soy...I had my filling.



Then I made the dough. Jon's recipe calls for just water and flour. The lovely Korean lady on TV said she adds an egg. Of course, having all these wonderful fresh eggs, I had to use egg! I made the dough and pattied it out into little circles with the edges a bit thinner than the center (a tip from TV) and proceeded to make my little "packets" of meat wrapped in dough. They didn't turn out as good as Jon's or the TV ladies, but they worked!



First I boiled them. Jon's recipe said "they're done when they float". Well, I wasn't so sure about that,



...but I fried them afterwards anyway. I like the way they look with a little browning.



I made the rat tart sauce and it was gorgeous! Tasted magnificent. It was just some rice vinegar, sesame oil, soy sauce, crushed garlic, and well-chopped fresh cilantro. The bowl of it looked like a lovely mosaic!



I served this sauce with the dumplings and some Hoisin sauce too. They were great mixed since the Hoisin sauce added some sweetness. I ate them with both sauces separately and with both sauces mixed together! Andy just had the rat tart sauce.



Needless to say, we both over-ate at lunchtime yesterday! They were scrumptious! We ate very lightly at supper!

*Rat tarts = that's what Jon called dumplings. It started from a time back when he was taking Shinkendo classes (Japanese swordsmanship) and they had a banquet to celebrate a promotion ceremony. We ate at a very nice Chinese restaurant and someone wanted to know what kind of meat was in the dumplings because they were so good. Jon said, "I don't care if it's rat, these are amazing!" So he started calling them rat tarts. And on the recipe he gave me, he called them Rat Tarts and Rat Tart Sauce! He had a very weird sense of humor. I miss that.