Daring Cooks June: Chinese dumplings - a half finished challenge

This post will not turn out the way we had hoped, unfortunately. It's time to present the second ever Daring Cooks challenge, hosted by Jen of use real butter (love that name - butter is better!). She has chosen Chinese dumplings/potstickers as the challenge.

We were so excited about this challenge, given our recent infatuation with Chinese food and Dim Sum. We started to make plans about all the different fillings to make. But time flew, we were busy, but on Thursday, three days before the reveal, we were finally going to make the dumplings.

Enter the flu.

I felt like crap all day, so Markus volunteered to do the cooking on his own (I tried to give some helpful advice and ask what I should do, but he kept sending my fever-clogged body back to bed). And then, when he had pleated about 2/3 of the dumplings, he started feeling woozy too. Neither one of us felt like steamed chicken dumplings, so the ones that were ready got tossed into the freezer - thankfully this months challenge is freezable! We had some dough and filling left, but frankly it never got used.

So, our dumplings are sitting in the freezer, while we are under the down cover, freezing too. We'll of course make a follow-up post on how they tasted once we have cooked them. We'll give you the recipe for the filling we made here; for full instructions on how to make the dumplings (including different fillings and cooking methods) go to Jen's blog. For the dough we used the method of Jen's mom, which worked really well.

Markus made really pretty dumplings and he reported that they were easy to make. To see the creations of the other Daring Cooks who made it all the way through, visit the Daring Kitchen!

Thank you Jen for a really great challenge - we are definitely returning to this one once we've stopped shivering...

Chicken dumpling filling:
(enough for one batch of Jen's mom's dough)

200 g grilled chicken meat
40 g bamboo shoots (canned)
40 g water chestnuts (canned)
20 g fresh ginger (cleaned weight)
20 g mushroom soy
15 g sesame oil
1 tbsp rice flour (the recipe called for corn starch, but we were out...)

Chop the chicken and vegetables very finely - Markus used a mixer, because he missed the detail in the recipe which told us not to do this. He says it worked well, so go ahead and be lazy as well if you want to. :) Mix the wet ingredients with the rice flour, and add it - if you're using a mixer, take her for one more spin.

Fill the dumplings as per Jen's instructions. Now, we can't vouch for the taste of this, so unless you're feeling adventurous (in Hong Kong we found that Chinese eating is about being adventurous so feel free to be that way) you might want to wait until our update before heading to the kitchen.