Holiday Dumplings Archives - Asian Dumpling Tips

Countdown to Chinese New Year: Easy Dumpling, Cocktail, and Decorating Ideas

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You may be thinking of nachos, guacamole and Super Bowl Sunday, but I’m focusing on the weekend after that: Valentine’s Day – Sunday, February 14 – to be exact, when people all over the world will also be celebrating Lunar New Year. It will be a double whammy – a romantic, luck-laden weekend.

Don’t miss out on doing something for Lunar New Year in 2010. It does not need to be extravagant. What’s important is getting together with family and friends to relax and renew. Late last year, my friend and colleague Jennifer Spiegel of Fork and Spoon event productions in San Francisco and I talked at length about how we can encourage people to have fun with Chinese New Year. The holiday can be intimidating if you get bogged down in too many details. What if you take a hassle-free approach? What’s involved?

Jennifer and I brainstormed and a couple of weeks ago had the opportunity to put our Chinese New Year ideas on camera. We teamed up to tape a short segment for View from the Bay, a popular San Francisco television show that broadcasts on our local ABC News affiliate. The segment aired this afternoon and is below for you to watch. Recipes are posted at the View from the Bay site.

You may recall that last October, I showed View from the Bay
hosts Janelle Wang and Spencer Christian how to make baked char siu bao pork buns. This time around, Jennifer and I had Nick Smith on camera with us. We shot the segment in
the Fork and Spoon kitchen, which is where I worked with Pablo to make hundreds of Asian dumplings for 125 people.

In less than 2 weeks, be prepared to say “Goodbye” to the Year of the Ox and “Hello” to the Year of the Tiger. Maybe our baked spiced lamb and potato curry puff, Shanghai Tiger cocktail, and nifty centerpiece will be part of your festivities?

Zongzi Wrapping Lesson from a Master

Holiday Dumplings, Rice Dumpling Recipes, Technique Videos and Photos

This Thursday, May 28 is the fifth day of the fifth moon according the Lunar Calendar. On that day, a good billion plus people around the world will be celebrating Duānwǔ Jié (端午節), a Chinese holiday that’s also known as the Double Fifth Festival in China and the Dragon Boat Festival in the West. What’s the deal with dragon boats? The story is that the holiday commemorates the drowning suicide death of Qu Yuan, a poet, scholar, and minister to the King of Chu in 278 BCE. A man willing to sacrifice his own life for the sake of his moral convictions, Qu was banished for treason when the king allied with a rival warlord. When the rival warlord over took the Chu state, Qu threw himself into the Miluo River in Hunan province.

The local people admired Qu so much that they attempted to preserve his body by throwing food into the river to distract the fish from eating his corpse. This is how the practice of making zòngzi , a.k.a. Chinese tamales, began. You have to paddle dragon boats out into the river and then throw the bamboo-leaf wrapped dumplings into the water. Pyramid-like zòngzi, made primarily of sticky rice and either a sweet or savory filling, becomes very heavy and hearty after its hours boiling so they’re bound to keep the fish busy for a while.