Surefire Siu Mai and Green Onion Pancakes

We made two recipes from Martin Yan's Chinatown Cooking tonight. First was the Siu Mai shown above -- it's the first time we tried making it! This was made with pork, so it's for Sheu and not me. ;) I formed the dumplings for him. The Siu Mai shape is harder to make than gyoza, so after about 14 of these, I switched to making the gyoza shape instead. The recipe made about 30 dumplings total (most of which went into the freezer!).

The filling contains: ground pork, black mushrooms, bamboo shoots, slightly beaten egg, green onion, soy sauce, salt, minced ginger, sugar, cornstarch, sesame oil, white pepper. There's a bit of grated carrot on top. We steamed them in our rice cooker.

While I was slaving over the Siu Mai, Sheu was slaving over Mandarin Green Onion Pancakes. They are actually kind of complicated to make! It involves kneading and rolling out the dough, rolling it up with green onions and cilantro inside, making a coil shape, then rolling it out again. Whew! Here's a picture of Sheu frying up the pancakes:

Click on the photos for a closer look!

Our New Aprons

The Autobot apron was my present to Sheu for Valentine's Day. I had it made at Cafe Press. I also bought a Cooking Cute apron for myself, from the Cooking Cute Cafe Press shop. :)

Super Easy Green Bean Recipe

I got this idea from a Flickr user named Tea Priestess. You simply steam (or boil) some green beans, then toss them with lemon juice and sesame oil. It's really yummy! We tried it with haricot verts tonight. I added course salt, but probably didn't need to...will probably try it without salt next time.

Cute Potato Shapes

Last night I cut sweet potatoes and regular potatoes with mini cookie cutters and boiled them for about 7 minutes. Then we fried them (Sheu helped with the sweet potatoes!)

The sweet potatoes (above) were fried with butter and brown sugar. The regular potatoes (below) were fried in olive oil with salt, pepper, and rosemary. They turned out very good -- nice a fluffy on the inside. We made a medium-sized batch -- I might have used them in a bento, but we ate them all up! :)


I also boiled the scrap pieces and made mashed potatoes.

My New Favorite Way to Eat Tofu

Last week I tried this Tofu Fish Sticks recipe from Vegan Lunch Box. It turned out great! During baking, the coating turns into a flavorful crust, and the tofu is perfectly light and spongy inside.

I used milk in place of the soy milk that the recipe calls for. I cut my tofu into plain rectangles, but according to the recipe you can cut the tofu into any shape you want (like a fish shape). Here's a photo of the ones I made. I ate them with ketchup, yum!

These seem very kid-friendly. The recipe is quite easy if you have a food processor. The hardest part might be finding the kelp granules -- I got them at a local organic foods market.

This Little Bento

I started up a bento blog! See my [almost] daily attempts at making lunch cute:

http://thislittlebento.blogspot.com