Cooking!

As you may already know, cooking has not been something I have done much of since I have been here. The temptation and ease of Sherpas and Element Fresh delivery after a long day at work are just too much! But I do enjoy cooking, so I have missed it.

Therefore, when Charlene suggested a Chinese cooking course for her birthday I jumped at the chance!

Chef Mike was our guide for the day, and our first dish was xiaolongbao - the traditional Shanghainese dim sum. They are different to normal dim sum because they have a soup inside them! The pastry (I'm not sure pastry is the right word, batter maybe?) was very easy to make - just wheat flour and water, but it was all very technical with how they are rolled out and shaped. Eventually you should end up with 8 perfectly circular shapes to fill with meat, but ours were a bit more "abstract" (to put it kindly!)

The filling in pork mince, onions, mushrooms and lots of sauces and herbs - vinegar, soy etc. there was also a load of chopped up pork jelly (yum!!). That proved to be the secret to the soup inside the dumpling - as the dumplings are steamed the pork jelly melts and turns into the soup! You have to twist the pastry around the meat filling in a fancy way of folding and pinching, which we managed with varying degrees of success...



My dim sum ready to steam (looking very pleased with myself!)

We also made pork wontons, which were made from ready made pastry (pah!) they were very easy to make, and the filling seemed pretty similar. They also looked quite impressive with only a small amount of effort.




These ones are boiled for a few minutes and then added to a soup.





Again, tasty! But really hard to eat with chopsticks!

Realistically I probably won't make them again myself - no idea on how to even start to find pork jelly and I don't want to think about what I might get by mistake!! But it was a really fun afternoon and it was great to get cooking again!

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