Last week Sunday, we had our annual Chinese New Year dinner at my parents’ house. Daniel, Tawni, and Nathan came down from Logan with Jacob, Rachael’s Utah State college kid, in tow. They don’t come down just for Sunday dinner very often, but this is the one that none of them want to miss! We had some traditional and delightful foods on hand such as char siu bao, wontons, rice, broccoli beef, chow fun noodles, etc. And of course, we had gau. My mom has been struggling more and more as the Parkinson’s progresses, and this time around, she let the rest of us carry most of the load where food prep was concerned. As such, Rachael made gau for the first time ever. Gau is pretty easy overall, but there was a bit of a learning curve. For some reason, the gau was even stickier than usual and because she forgot to oil the banana leaves in the pan before pouring the batter in, peeling the leaves away was a monumental task. There was much laughter as we worked together to slice off chunks of gau and peel away the leaves so the confection could be consumed. I had to wash my hands long and hard twice before they didn’t feel sticky anymore. LAUGHING WITH TEARS SMILY
Tawni reminded us that it was exactly a year ago when she met the extended family for the first time. This past year seems to have gone by so very quickly but at the same time, having Tawni around feels totally normal, not new at all. She loves to cook, and that desire to create delightful meals has extended to include all these Chinese dishes that I grew up eating. I’ve mentioned before that my boys are embracing their food heritage and learning how to make all these things and having Tawni jump on the band wagon adds another person who can pass these traditions and skills on to the next generation. In fact, the kids planned to create a Chinese New Year dinner of their very own on the actual day and my mom sent Tawni home with pork hash, wonton wrappers, and who even knows what else to facilitate that plan!
As for me, I’ve also been learning how to make some new foods. Last week I made several small batches of gau. One small batch was steamed because honestly, the bit I had of Rachael’s was just not enough. It is one of those once in a while kind of desserts that I just love but only eat about once a year. The remaining small batches were experimental microwave cooked batches. I was preparing a box to send to Matthew, a themed assortment focusing on his birthday and Chinese New Year and wanted to be able to send him the needed ingredients and instructions to make gau. While I have seen several sets of instructions for cooking gau in the microwave, it was not something I had tried. And as Matthew would be making only a small amount rather than a full sized gau, the cook times would obviously need to be adjusted. Hence the experimentation.
My first attempt was a total failure. You can’t judge whether or not gau is done with a simple toothpick test like you can with cake. No matter how long you cook it, it is always super sticky when warm. You can let it cool completely and then check texture but even then, it can be remarkably viscous. Last year I made the gau, let it cool, popped it out of the pan the day afterwards and then steamed it some more because it was not fully cooked. But this time I was not so good at waiting hours and hours for it to cool, so I was kind of flying by the seat of my pants. The end result was that I cooked it far too long and once it cooled a bit, it was completely hard. And by hard, I mean it would not come out of the pan and had absolutely no give at all, not even the rubberized feel of super dense gau. It was literally a rock of rice flour and sugar welded to the Pyrex dish I cooked it in. It took two days of soaking in the sink, with me scraping off layers of gau as the water softened them, before the dish was clean. It was a serious fail. But with that knowledge in my arsenal, my next attempt was much closer to what I wanted it to be, and the third one yielded the desired results.
Today is the actual lunar new year and my creations, while less varied than last week’s dinner, were delightful. I have made char siu bao many times and so that was an easy one. I also made homemade potstickers, which are not all that tricky. But my proud moment dish was jin dui, Chinese sesame balls, or as my mom describes them, Chinese doughnuts. This was the very first time I have attempted to make them, so I spent some time online searching for tips for success, you know those little things that people intuitively do when they have long years of experience but never write down as part of the recipe. And my attempt was not half bad. They puffed up like they were supposed to and came out nicely rounded and crispy. I was pretty proud of myself! Having said that, there was definitely a learning curve. I used my great Aunty Simmy’s recipe as a guide, and her filling was a combination of coconut, peanuts (although I used almonds instead so there would be no fatalities in my house this evening), and a bit of sugar. It was a loose filling rather than the more common paste fillings and it was exceedingly difficult to get it inside the balls of dough. I was only able to put just a tiny bit in and still get the dough to stay nicely sealed without cracking. And the dough itself was far too wet. It was more of a batter than a dough and I ended up needing to add a lot of additional rice flour to make it workable. But even with those challenges, I feel like the end result was pretty good. I will decrease the amount of water quite a bit next time and I will be looking for another filling recipe. The coconut filled ones you can get in Hawaii are my favorite ones, so I want to find a recipe for a coconut paste of some sort that I can roll into a ball. That and a drier dough should make shaping them much easier. I know I will be trying again at some point, and hopefully the results will be even better.
So, this evening’s repast was largely a success. While Kevin and Malia were not all that enthused about the jin dui, the bao and potstickers were enjoyed all around. And I have tucked a few jin dui into a bag to send to my mom. She really likes them and I don’t need to eat an entire recipe by myself!
As for my college kiddos and their Chinese food offerings, Daniel called me to ask how hot the oil should be to fry wontons. I was totally channeling my mom or something because the first thing that popped out of my mouth was, “Hot enough.” FACE PALM EMOJI You know how your sixteen-year-old self vehemently declares that you will definitely not grow up to be like your parents? Yeah, it would seem that I have severely disappointed my inner teenager in some ways. LAUGHING WITH TEARS EMOJI But, I did thereafter give a more helpful response and the wontons cooked up beautifully. Daniel shared a comment made by Tawni’s sister Charlotte: “I can still squeeze behind Tawni’s chair, therefore I can eat another wonton.” I guess that means they tasted just as good as they looked!
