Monday: Chinese New Years

Xīn Nián Kuài Lè, Welcome year of the tiger! In honor of the recent chinese new year celebrations, we decided to enjoy a night of dumplings, lanterns and gifts. Although this blog is a month overdue the dinner we prepared was well worth the wait. Tessa and I prepared nearly 50 dumplings total and among them 4 different flavors. Including vegetarian, spicy shrimp, chicken hoisen, chicken ginger. All in all the night was a smashing success, we decorated the dining room and spent quite a bit of time picking choice ingredients at our local Asia Market as well as practiced our very limited Mandarin vocabulary.

• Chicken Ginger Dumplings ★★★★★

This is our stand by favorite recipe for dumplings, mild garlic undertones with a prevalent ginger flavor. Depending on ones personal preferences this dumpling can be mad with any kind of lean ground meat, chicken and pork being the better of the choices. Served steamed and with a side of your favorite dipping sauces and this makes an excellent side dish (or in tonights case, main dish)

• Spicy Shrimp Dumplings ★★★★

We didin't follow any specific recipe for these dumplings, we read several articles online about traditional dumplings and what dishes are served during the Chinese New Year celebrations and came up with this recipe on the fly. It was much to spicy for my stomach's liking but Dustin ate almost all of them (if that is any indication of their success).

• Chicken Hoisen Dumplings ★★★

The flavoring for this bath of dumplings came from a hoisen BBQ recipe I had from a very American cook book. However the end result was very good, although Tessa and Dustin did not care for these as much as some of the others we had no left overs of this dish either.

• Vegetarian Dumpling ★★★

We loosely followed an online recipe I had printed off in honor for our dinner and were pleasantly surprised by how delicate and delicious they turned out. We did not have any tofu on hand so we improvised, with great success. Dustin opposed these dumplings but Tessa and I enjoyed them. By far my favorites!

★★★★★ - Great ★★★★ - Good

★★★ - Satisfactory ★★ - Marginal ★ - Poor

Sadly many of the pictures of the dumplings did not turn out but trust our happy stomachs, it was delicious. Due to the backlog of blogs I need to catch up on/publish I will attach recipes later. I also need to consult with Tessa on what exactly we used in some of our dishes, so much of our Monday nights has become a exercise in improvisation. Until then

Good Luck, Good Eats and God Bless,

Dustin and Kathryn