Today’s dinner

Cooking was always the least favorite activity of my mom, when I was little she baked amazing cakes and cookies but eventually she wouldn’t do it again. I remember eating the same (about) 15 recipes my whole life until I started cooking. And I loved eating at restaurants and getting take outs, until I lost my last job and then I became really picky with the food, most likely I’m not willing to pay for meals that just don’t worth it if I can make amazing dishes for just a fraction of the price or if they have the worst service ever.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be having breakfast at iHop, which still is one of my favorite restaurants, at this point I make better pancakes but remember the egg dilemma? well I never walk away from scrambled eggs. So I’m starting dinner and tomorrow’s lunch about in a few minutes.

I’m awful at Mexican dishes, the ones that my mom passed to me include picadillo and cortadillo, pretty much the same, ground beef or diced beef with potatoes and carrots on tomato sauce, and that’s what I’m making for them, my mom and dad like that kind of stuff, I don’t. I’ll be having tuna maki and for the first time I’ll try to make gyozas, well a version of it because I don’t eat pork, most likely will replace it with some of the ground beef.

All the ingredients for the makis are ready in the fridge, and the extra rice became zucchini rice balls topped with sesame seeds, also in the freezer, waiting to be part of a bento.

The makis will be very simple just some tuna with mayo and soy sauce, carrot, avocado, cucumber and cream cheese, they are merely a side dish for the gyozas.

Today in the supermarket, couldn’t find all the ingredients for the gyozas so I’ll be substituting a few (maybe most of them!!!), here is the original recipe.

Now, this is what I used for the filling:

• 1 cup grated cabagge
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1 cup ground meat
• 2 tbsp chopped green onion
• 2 tbsp grated carrot
• 1 tsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp crushed red chili pepper
• pinch of salt

After mixing it, put it in the fridge and proceeded to make the gyoza skins, I used chopsticks for mixing!!! I had to wait about an hour before starting rolling the skins. That was hard, I think there is something wrong with the rolling thingy, I don’t know, the recipe yield 20 skins, I ruined 3 :(. The frying cooking process is very interesting, most likely because I’ve never tried a dumpling before.

From the first batch I tried, probably half of them got ruined, and lost the bottoms, so for the next one used a different pan, one with teflon and used a little bit more oil. Big difference. It took me about 2 hours to get them ready but absolutely worth the effort. Another thing, is really important to watch the cooking time otherwise they would stick to the pan. I also believe I made the skins too big, but it was ok though I don’t think that was a problem.

When I tried them noticed that I had definitely forgot about the salt in the beef mixture, so I had to prepare the sauce, the recipe wasn’t near so I made a different one.

I mixed:

• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 1/4 tsp rice vinegar
• pinch of crushed red chili pepper

Here the final result:

Gyozas were a lot of work, and considering my previous experience with rolling dough, I made half batch, enough for two, so I’ll be freezing half the recipe. Funny thing, without really think about it I saved the best ones for later.

Best gyozas I’ve ever tried so far.

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