For the Superbowl last weekend I made these pork dumplings. They are quite easy to put together and make a good party dish. I had to mess around with the dipping sauce a bit because the first attempt came out too vinegary. This is a good dish to make if you are having a few people over, it’s even better if they want to pitch in and help put the dumplings together! Enjoy!
I haven’t cooked with Szechuan peppercorns in a while and decided to throw together a Szechuan style stir fry the other night. I marinated the chicken in a mixture of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, corn starch, water, and salt. I then put oil in a wok and heated it until it just started to smoke. I added the chicken in batches and cooked it until it was done. I then added the Szechuan peppercorns and dried chili peppers and sauteed them for 30 seconds to a minute. I then added a bit of chicken stock, soy sauce, and rice wine vinegar. I reduced this mixture to thicken it a little. If I had uncooked veggies like snow peas or peppers I would have added them here to cook them. Since I was using steamed broccoli I added the cooked chicken and broccoli to the wok to coat it in the sauce. I then served the stir fry over brown rice.
The stir fry turned out good and the Szechuan peppercorns gave the dish a unique sensation when eating it. If you have never had them before they cause a tingling or slight numbing sensation in your mouth. They can be hard to find, I had to go on Amazon to find them.
I recently experimented with creating an Asian inspired sauce for chicken. I was surprised at how this sauce turned out, reducing the soy sauce brings develops a very savory flavor in this sauce and the addition of the garlic chili sauce lends a nice heat. The only downside to this sauce is that it is a bit thin, to fix this you need to add some flour to bring it to your desired consistency. You can serve this dish with Spicy Ginger Noodles and snow or snap peas.
I saw a recipe very similar to this the other week and wanted to make it. However, it turns out Sichuan peppercorns are quite difficult to find and after visits to many supermarkets I came up with nothing. I wound up getting the peppercorns off of Amazon. They were well worth the purchase. They give of a tingly and numbing spiciness that I had never tasted before. This dish bring a lot of heat, but the sensation of the peppercorns makes the heat from the chilies tolerable. This dish is best served over rice noodles. If you want to try a new Chinese dish and you like spicy food I recommend giving this dish a shot.
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