Pot Stickers! (And Dry-fried Beef with Asparagus)

I believe I've mentioned before my love of (almost) all foods Asian.  Not much has changed there, but I recently rediscovered a recipe for pot stickers that is so easy and so tasty that I'm not sure why they haven't made it into the routine line-up around here.

I originally discovered this recipe about 8 years ago, I think.  For a time I belonged to one of those cookbook clubs where you sign on initially and get something like 5 cookbooks for $1.00, then you have to buy three more at the regular club price - or something.  It was actually a pretty good deal - some great books, at deep discounts, came out of that membership.  One of the books I got was The Minimalist Cooks Dinner, by Mark Bittman (I know very little about this man, but that picture immediately conjures "smug New Yorker" in my mind.  It's probably a good thing I hadn't seen it when I selected his book.)  The book is a collection of recipes taken from his NYT column "The Minimalist" and are meant to be approachable weeknight recipes.  Seemed just right at a time when I was still newly discovering my love of cooking, but also had an 8 and 9-year old to try and feed, at least by 7:00 pm.  See - didn't they look hungry?

The recipe for pot stickers jumped out at me from the start - probably because I knew we all loved them - but I was equally certain that there was no way in hell I would ever be able to make them.  Still, I gave it a try - though I'm sure the first time was on a weekend when I could devote hours, if necessary, to getting them right.  As it turned out, this recipe delivered as promised: a short list of ingredients easily found in Bay Area grocery stores and a cooking technique that was fast and yielded excellent results.  The most challenging part of it was getting the right amount of filling into the dumpling wrappers: enough to make them plump but not so much to prevent them from sealing completely.  And Mark was right - pretty quickly you develop a rhythm and before you know it, you're done.

So when I recently decided to tackle another Chinese meal at home (looking once again to tap my newly acquired Asian cooking staples), it seemed natural, if not entirely authentic, to start with these.  

I followed them with a dish I'd never tried before, from a cookbook that claims a certain level of authenticity and that I've had for several years but amazingly, had never cooked from:  The Land of Plenty, by Fuchsia Dunlop - another apparently well-known-to-others cookbook author.  Why I haven't cooked from this book before is a (partial) mystery.  I mean, 1) it's Asian and 2) it's Sichuan! What's NOT to love?  Once I started thumbing through it, however, I remembered why:  I lacked a specific ingredient that seemed to have a regular starring role - Sichuan Pepper - because until 2005 the USDA had banned the import of this spice.

When it did become available I immediately bought a bottle of peppercorns and threw a hearty teaspoon of them into an improvised stir-fry one night.  Ack.  The flavor was overwhelming and unpleasant and very quickly my tongue had a strange tangy/numby/tingly feeling.  The jar stayed in my spice cabinet, untouched, until last month.  I had finally gained the courage - having by then read more about the spice and the need to 1) toast the peppercorns first, 2) crush them in a mortar, and 3) SPARINGLY sprinkle the powder on the dish just before serving - to try them once again.            

The recipe is recreated here.  To it, I added asparagus because a vegetable was really needed somewhere in this meal.  Mine ended up looking like this:

It was very good. But if I'm being 100% truthful, there were also lingering sensations from my first failed effort that prevented me from loving it the way I know I should.