Comme les Chinois

Making dumplings is not a family tradition at all. My father occasionally makes wontons (once a year perhaps) in its most basic form of shrimp and pork and skins that you buy from the supermarket.

On the other hand, in my desire to be different from family tradition, I’ve been inviting friends over for many years to make dumplings. We treat it as a social activity, sort of to pay hommage to the cult of slow food – because making dumplings is kind of slow.

There was this time last month when coming home from a long day at work, I felt like making dumplings at home. I also happened to have a pack of frozen ground lamb (from Adonis, a Middle-Eastern supermarket chain) that had been sitting there for many months. Here’s what it looked like after I added coriander, green onions and seasoning (soy sauce, sugar, salt):

Then, I decided that they wouldn’t be homemade dumplings if I didn’t also make my own skins. In my first few dumplings parties, I always made my own skins, but found that most people didn’t and that it was so time-consuming that it started to have an averse effect on appetite… Skins are fairly simple: flour + water, until you get a ball of moist dough.

Using a plastic beer mug that followed me since one of those inter-university conventions of my undergraduate years, I would make individual skins starting from small ball (roughly the size of a large marble).

Then, you can either send them to the steamer or the frying pan. The fried option is perhaps tastier and requires you to add half an inch of water to a frying pan and a good tablespoon of oil. Boil the dumplings until the water dries out and fry both sides to get the crisp brown texture. Then, serve and enjoy.

It took me maybe an hour and a half from the time I broke open the flour bag to eating the first (steamed) batch. With a ball of lamb the size of a softball, I had enough dumplings for the night, lunch and one more portion for the freezer.

I must say that I still have trouble making skins that are as thin as those served in restaurants like Qing Hua Yuan. However, it’s a rather simple and easy meal to prepare; probably even fun to do with friends in any season.

Edit: Qing Hua Dumplings closed down in June or July 2009 because of a zoning issue. They are going to re-open somewhere in the Lincoln / St-Mathieu area with a larger location. Are handmade dumplings becoming the new sushi?

I discovered Qing Hua Yuan Dumplings (1240 St-Marc, corner Tupper) just over a month ago. Like a lot of people, according to this Chowhound thread, I’ve been waiting and waiting for a restaurant specializing in the Chinese dish of dumplings (jiaozi).

Well, there it is, opened by a certain Mr. Song, on St-Marc, just south of Ste-Catherine on what seems to be a residential block. It’s also really close to the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

About the dumplings, they can either be boiled, steamed or fried. The fried option: I never actually had it and doubt that it is even available. The steamed option is by far the best one in terms of experience, but not if you are in a hurry. It will take an average of 20 minutes to get your steamers of dumplings.

The result is something that goes unmatched in Montreal with its main qualities being thin skin and quantities of tasty broth. Qing Hua Yuan is also remarkable because its menu is almost exclusively dumplings. No General Tao chicken (thank Gott), and only cold Chinese salads (cucumber, or cabbage and vermicelli) as the “stomach-holder” while waiting for things to steam.

Briefly before the Mirror‘s Mark Slutsky and La Presse‘s Marie-Claude Lortie wrote about Qing Hua Yuan, you could order some beef noodles, which is a bowl of handmade wheat noodles served in a spicy soup with Chinese vegetable and slices of precooked beef.

Just as your local home renovation centre is bringing out flowers, herbs and other greens to seduce you, I found out on Monday that a grocery store in Brossard (Taschereau, where else), Heng-Heng, is in turn selling potted plants of all sorts: melons, chilis, herbs that you put in your pho (the middle pic, says Vietnamese friend).

I didn’t in fact buy anything there, preferring to settle for “Western” plants for now. They include the very versatile coriander, one that can be used interchangeably in dishes, east, west confounded.

If my notes are accurate, the three plants in the previous pic were, from top to bottom, chili, bitter melon and cucumber.

Most plants were priced at 2$ per pot. For a limited time, I guess.