homemade | So This is Julie

It’s back to the kitchen and catching up on chores this week. The weather has been so nice that I’ve neglected the decluttering andÂ mini-mountains of clothes that need folding, and instead have been riding my bike with Ollie and hanging out at various parks. The kids have also had a little education in local and federal government as the whole family applied for passports. Abby laughed as we posed for our pictures, “Mom, it’s like we’re in jail?!” Yes, but would we by smiling?

I like Ollie’s first attempt:

Last weekend we hosted a House Party sponsored by Calphalon and Williams-Sonoma and while we weren’t selected as the hosts to have Chef Michael Symon visit, we had a fantastic time with our guests. The easiest part about this dinner party: the menu, along with recipes and a grocery list, was supplied by Calphalon and Williams-Sonoma. We were so busy cooking up dinner, I had my brother-in-law and cousin take some pictures and I hope to post some soon.

Friends came over a few months ago and taught us how to make homemade pasta. We tried homemade potstickers so I thought, homemade noodles shouldn’t be too difficult.

Basic recipe

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups semolina flour
6 large eggs (at room temperature)
pinch of salt

We combined the dry ingredients in a large bowl, made a well in the middle then cracked the eggs into the flour. Using a fork, begin beating the eggs lightly as if scrambling them, and the flour will start “falling” into the egg mixture. Continue beating the eggs to incorporate the flour slowly. The mixture will begin forming into dough, and then once the dough begins to stiffen and all the flour is incorporated, you can take it out of the bowl to knead. It wasn’t very pretty, pulling and pushing the dough, squishing it around. Our friend made it look all nice and rectangular. Mine sort of looked amoeba-shaped until I folded it over again to knead some more. I think we did this for a few minutes before running it through the pasta machine. And when we did, it took a few passes to get to the thickness we wanted. We hung the noodles up as we finished the rest of the dough and got a big pot of water and salt to a rolling boil. The noodles cooked quickly in less than 5 minutes.

As a person living in an Asian household and cooking Asian food, there are some must-haves in the kitchen like a rice cooker with a steamer attachment, a hefty bag of short grain rice (in our case we have three different kinds), a wok, soy sauce, you get the picture. But egg roll wrappers or dumpling wrappers, we usually buy those from the Asian market. Until one day… we got the itch to roll out our own wrappers after watching Anita Lo (Top Chef Masters) make some. It’s only water, flour and salt. Oh, correction, HOT water. We used cornstarch to dust the rolling pins, surface and our hands.

Abby thought it’d be fun to help. Thank goodness Ollie was napping. (Yeah, look at my man’s guns there.)

Anita Lo makes it look so easy on television! I didn’t feel so bad, though, when Bobby Flay tried making some on one of his “Throwdown” shows (dumpling recipe here).

Note the “store bought” skins in the background. That was for insurance in case we totally botched up the recipe. As it was, it turned out pretty well. We have to work on our technique, but we did use the ready made skins for the extra meat filling we had leftover.

I’d share our filling recipe, except we don’t have one that’s completely documented or consistent, yet. Just know that we use ground pork, napa cabbage, sesame oil, salt and pepper. I’m sure I’ll update this with a proper recipe sooner or later.

So This is Julie

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Tag Archives: homemade

Catching Up and Homemade Pasta

Making homemade potstickers