Adore-a-bowl: New Year's Ouroboros

Happy New Year!

For me, New Year's Eve involves a lot of traditional foods and family traditions. One of them involves turning on all of the lights in the house to usher in a "bright" future (get it?).

One year, I kind of forgot about this tradition.

After turning off my lights and going to sleep, I woke up around 2am to see that the lights were all on in the hallway. The first though that popped into my head was: burglars!! Armed with a lava lamp and pure adrenaline, I tiptoed downstairs to scope out the situation still in my pajamas. My tiptoeing woke up and freaked out my parents, who jumped out of bed to find me looking bewildered in the living room with an unplugged lamp...it was a very memorable New Years. Haha. Anyway, I hope your New Years is not only about breaking with the Old and chasing after the New, but I hope that it is also about embracing a continuum with Traditions. Friends, family, habits, or dreams--this is a great time to appreciate all of them in a new light ;)

In the spirit of embracing old and new--I want to share an old, trusty family recipe which has just been passed to me yesterday: Stuffed Chicken Buns! I will outline the basic steps below, but the recipe is versatile enough to substitute in other meats and/or veggies.

Chicken Buns Recipe (makes about 20 medium buns)

Ingredients for the filling:
1/2 pound of ground chicken meat (mom uses chicken breast)
6 large Shitake mushrooms
Minced ginger (about 2 tsp)
2 stalks of green onion, diced
1/8 cup broth (mom adds her own secret chicken broth)
8 large cabbage leaves, diced
salt, pepper, sugar, and sesame oil to taste

*Tip: Mom sticks small spoonfuls of the filling in the microwave so that she can taste it before filling the buns.

Ingredients for the dough:
1 cup warmed milk
1 tsp yeast
1 tbsp sugar
3 cups all purpose flour

Steps:
1. Mix yeast and sugar with the warmed milk. Let sit for 10 min, until bubbles form.
2. Either by hand, or using a bread machine, mix in the flour until the dough is smooth. Wrap in a warm towel and stick in a warm room or oven (mom turns it on for about 5 min then turns it off to get the right temp). Allow to rise to about twice its normal size.
3. In the meantime, prepare the filling. This basically involves dicing everything, and then mixing it all together to taste in a large bowl. The chicken broth not only allows the mixture to be soft in texture, it adds a nice savory flavor. See below for how the filling should look when you're done.

4. When the dough is ready, mom rolls it into a cylinder, then dices it into about 20 even pieces. She then flattens each each and coats it in flour so it's easy to handle.

5. Next, using a rolling pin (and a lot of experience), roll out the small slices into dumpling-wrapper sized pancakes. Tip: you want to rotate the dough as you flatten so that it is even in thickness all around.

Haha, I can't roll mine nearly as fast. No worries, it takes practice.

6. Next, you simply fill each pancake with about 2 tbsp of filling. In a pinching motion, go around the sides of the pancake until you close the entire bun. Every family has their own patented folding method, I am told. Experiment to find your own! Just make sure it is sealed tightly.

These are my buns. The twists need a lot more practice. LOL.

7. It's a piece of cake from here, really. You just boil a large pot of water and fill a steamer with your creations. They should be fluffy and irresistible within half an hour! Tip: mom lays each bun on a square of parchment paper so they don't stick to the holes in the steamer.

8. Nom Nom away!

Let me know if you have any questions :) I also want to share two new recipes mom tested out on me yesterday. I'm very, very lucky.