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!

Ever since Ivonne and Lis announced that they were forming a Daring Cooks’ group, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the first challenge recipe.  And I was not to be disappointed: the doyennes of The Daring Kitchen had chosen ricotta gnocchi from The Zuni Café Cookbook by Judy Rodgers.

Gnocchi are my Achilles heel.  I love them to bits, but whenever I’ve tried making them, it has been somewhat disastrous.  I remember trying to make butternut squash gnocchi when I was pregnant, only for my nice neat gnocchi to completely disintegrate when they went into the simmering water.  I kid you not.  It looked like I’d made soup and all I could do was stand there and cry big fat tears into the pan.

My next fearful foray into gnocchi was making potato gnocchi to go with a beef goulash from a Gary Rhodes recipe.  Everything would have been fine, I’m sure, if I had cooked them immediately after shaping, but I was trying to do everything in advance as it was for a Hogmany dinner. *sigh* They didn’t disintegrate but were rather gluey.  Okay, very gluey.

So, when I set out to make the challenge recipe, I made damn sure that I’d read the recipe at least three times and watched every YouTube video I could find on the subject of ricotta gnocchi.  Oh, yeah… I’d never eaten ricotta gnocchi before, either, so had no idea what the texture should be like.  Still, many years of enthusiastic eating have qualified me to say what is tasty and what is not!

I decided to go the whole hog and make my own ricotta for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, the supermarket ricotta I buy is very, very wet and I didn’t think it would drain enough and secondly, I had everything I needed to make the ricotta and thought it would be fun!  And it was both fun and really, really easy.  I would totally do it again as it’s much cheaper than buying a tub of ricotta, plus it tasted better.

When I (very nervously) came to make my gnocchi it turned out that I had nothing to worry about.  My ricotta was bone dry and it easily whipped up into a thick, but fluffy batter.  The only thing that went wrong—because something always has to go wrong when I do gnocchi, right?—was that my beloved microplane grater somehow snapped in half when I was grating the Parmesan and I grated a little bit of myself in the ensuing panic.  Am I the only person to have ever broken a microplane like that?  I thought those things were indestructible!

I made rough quenelles of the batter and dropped them into a shallow bowl of flour to shape them.  After the first couple, I got brave and just quickly patted little spoonfuls of batter between my floured hands to shape the gnocchi.  This was far less sticky than previous efforts.  Yay!

The recipe calls for making and cooking a test gnocchi which is such an awesome idea!  I wish I’d thought of that years ago and saved myself many a tear.  Interestingly, the little lumps and bumps of each gnocchi smooth out during the cooking process and each gnocchi almost doubles in size which makes this a great recipe for greedy people like me.  I was also quite fascinated to note how each gnocchi rose from the bottom of the pan in the exact order they’d been dropped into the simmering water.  It was like a scene from Fantasia!

As I’d never tasted ricotta gnocchi before, I decided to keep things very simple and just make a thick tomato sauce to go with them.  I wanted to be able to taste the unadulturated flavour of the gnocchi before dipping into a familiar and comforting sauce.

I’m very pleased to say that this first Daring Cooks’ challenge managed to exorcise the ghosts of gnocchi past.  My gnocchi cooked up into pillowy clouds of ricotta goodness and both Dave and I loved them.  Lucas was less keen, but I didn’t care as that meant there was more for me!  Hooray!

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