Asian Week

I declared it Asian week in the Starnes kitchen last week.  We stocked up on supplies at H Mart in Wheaton - rice paper, rice noodles, dried mushrooms, sushi rice, seaweed wraps, special sauces.  All good stuff.

This sesame cracker was something new for us.  They don't look like much in the package,

but stick it in the microwave for a minute and -

 POOF!  They puff up into a fluffy, crispy, tasty cracker!

We used them to taste our potsticker sauces.

Now, the potstickers themselves are another story.  A failure for sure.  I thought it was just because I used an odd mishmash of flours (a bit of GF all-purpose, a bit of GF mix from a big company, a big of "high protein" mix), but I think what actually happened was I was thinking Tablespoons instead of teaspoons when I added the xanthan gum. They tasted fine, but were tough and hard to work with.  I think xanthan gum was the culprit.  I'll be trying again, though, probably tomorrow, so there should be an update.  The chicken filling was really good though - chicken ground in the Mini-chopper, garlic, ginger, spicy pepper, a dash of fish sauce.

Other items made this week:

sushi filled with cucumber, avocado, wasabi crab, sriracha crab.

Sushi rice recipe from Alton Brown.  We actually left the rice on the counter overnight (it gets hard if refigerated) for making the same the next night (actually, husband had the rest of the crab, I had veg & chicken, more like a bibimbap).

The next night I made meatball summer rolls.  Sounds weird, but we had a version of this (with pork, I believe) at Vietnam restaurant in Philadelphia.  I took ground chicken and seasoned it the way I did for the potstickers earlier, then cooked it on the grill pan in small patties.  Rolled up with rice vermicelli, basil, cilantro, and pickled radish, carrot and cucumber, it was a great summer meal.

Somewhere in there we also made fish tacos.  Fresh corn tortillas filled with mojo-marinated grilled fish and queso fresco.  Awesome.

And last, but not least, this morning's breakfast: potato and pancetta hash (with onion) and topped with a runny egg.  This used up a package of pancetta ends we picked up at DiBruno Brothers on our trip to Philadelphia.  Probably wouldn't use them again though, they were pretty tough.