Gyoza

I cannot believe that I have never written here about making gyoza until I tried looking for it here to check which recipe I had used. And of course I couldn't find it. This is what I meant when I mentioned that I need an external memory! Duh!

Our princess didn't take to gyoza until as recent as two years back. She had started off with eating Xiao Long Bao (小笼包), in restaurants and eyed our gyoza sceptically, usually turning her nose up on it when offered. Then sometime ago, after she heard the crunch when we bit into ours, she has been unstoppable since. These days she would ask to order a portion of Xiao Long Bao (小笼包) AND gyoza each for herself before she goes on to order a main course. This girl is going to eat us out of our house soon!

So to prevent that from happening, I told hubby that we had better start making these dumplings and save ourselves a fortune.

We chose The Japanese Kitchen for this recipe and this book has never disappointed me. The texture of the wrappers was a big surprise for us. It was so much better than those store bought wonton wrappers which were too thin and flimsy to work with. These were easy to handle when rolling and sturdy enough to hold all the fillings without tearing. And the best part was after cutting out the rounds for the wrappers, the leftover trimmings were dumped into a boiling pot of water and we found ourselves slurping bowls of hand-made noodles which were so much better than those we ate at supposedly reputable noodle restaurants.

It was a total disaster for us, diet wise. We over-ate and were over-loaded with carbs. But the strange thing was that we didn't feel the bloat that usually accompanies such dinners when we pig out.

As with anything that is suppose to save money, these buggers take quite a while to prep. From start to finish, it took us about 4 hours. But then that's just amateurs messing around in a tiny kitchen, so don't let our timing scare anyone.