Well, here I am.  A day late, but hopefully not a dollar short.  I totally spaced on this month’s Daring Cooks challenge.  I managed to convince myself that the posting date was the 17th and it was only when I saw dumplings popping up on my Google Reader, like a bloom of jellyfish, that it dawned on me that I was late.

“I’m late, I’m late!  For a very important date!” said I, channelling the White Rabbit, and promptly scurried off to the supermarket for supplies.

This month’s Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by the lovely Jen from Use Real Butter and is Chinese dumplings.

Chinese dumplings can be boiled, steamed, or fried.  I am a big fan of frying them to create potstickers as you get the best of two worlds: a gorgeous golden crispy base and a softly steamed upper half.  Mmm… magical.

So after practically throwing Lucas into bed, I got into the kitchen and started chopping.  And chopping.  And chopping.  Half-way through the ingredients list for the pork filling I found myself coming up with bad puns about chopping sprees.  (According to Jen, you have to chop by hand as a food processor creates either mush or irregularly chopped pieces of vegetable.  My knife callus bears testament to my determination to have finely minced veggies in my filling.)

Making the dough was easy enough since I happily used the food procesor for that.  Rolling the dough into decently thin circles was the hardest part for me.  Try as I might, I just couldn’t turn out a perfect circle which then had a knock-on effect with my pleating.  And as we all know, the real art of Chinese dumplings comes from the pleats that give them their trademark crescent shape.  *sigh*  Still, the later ones looked much prettier than my first attempts, so at least I improved.

I actually finished making a batch of the dumplings last night, but managed to burn them all.  I don’t mean a few blackened speckles… I mean solid black bottoms.  I was so dispirited that I (a) didn’t want to take a photo of such tragic dumplings and (b) couldn’t be bothered rolling and filling the other half of the dough so I left that for this morning and attempted to make some with Lucas.  Suffice to say that my dreams of having a dumpling production line in my kitchen have been dashed.  He did have great fun squidging the pork filling and poking at the already shaped dumplings, though!

When I finally finished filling all the dumplings, I shoved two-thirds of them into the freezer for Dave and very, very carefully fried the rest for lunch.  Lucas loved the huge plume of steam that shot out of the pan when I poured in the cold water and couldn’t wait to try the potstickers.  Heck, neither could I.  They smelled so good!

As good as they smelled, the potstickers tasted even better!  I knew I was on to a winner when I flipped one over and it was gorgeously golden brown with an audibly crispy base.  Mmmm… crunchy.  The filling was smooth, fresh and very fragrant with beautifully chopped vegetables, even if I do say so myself!  The best thing is that Lucas loved them, and he’s been a little fussy in his eating habits lately, except where chocolate is concerned of course.  He’s not stupid!  At any rate, he demolished a plateful of potstickers with plenty of “dip-dip” and tried to steal some of mine!   I suspect that my near-future involves making lots of dumplings…

For the recipe and fabulous step-by-step photographs, see Jen’s post here.  Thanks for a great challenge, Jen!