Happy Lunar New Year: Rabbits, Unite

Happy Chinese New Year and happy Lunar New Year!

It is the year of the rabbit, and we couldn’t be more grateful for the hope of a lucky year ahead. Auspicious full moons, creativity in our notebooks and maybe a few tasty treats as well. Wishing you and your families all the brightness and peace of a fresh start and good fortune to come with the hare.

We stumble on through the wilderness of trying to make up traditions as we go, and for Chinese New Year’s Eve, we made dumplings. It was great!

We used this recipe for pork and chive dumplings, and they really turned out better than I could’ve imagined. I highly, highly recommend it. It was so good I’m considering getting their cookbook.

We used pre-made dumpling wrappers (from any Asian mart, ours were from T&T—the one on College, which was a zoo around LNY). I also added chopped ginger and garlic, and also I accidentally “cooked”/toasted the wrong oil and then it was too late for me to cook the other oil so we just went with it. And we didn’t measure the chives (just put in the whole pack, and we also had twice the amount of ground pork, since we purchased pre-packaged) and also added chopped garlic shoots. And we did some minor estimating on other parts. Evidently, this is a recipe that has wide allowances for ingredient measurements.

Here is our dumpling operation! Super professional, with a variety of forms for every taste. The ones with super flat wrappers, ravioli style, were also tasty because the abundant wrapper gets all crisp when you fry it. I wish I’d taken a picture of it, but alas I did not have the foresight.

It seems like there is a lot of chives in the bowl, but it was a great balance with the meat, good texture and added flavour.

One little baby, ready for the frying pan. I highly recommend a cast iron for getting a crispy bottom on your dumplings, fresh or frozen.

Even the baby got in on the action. She is an excellent self-feeder. Two fat dumplings, gobble, gobble.

***

I am Chinese and also “Chinese” and so I am winging things as I go. I am learning about my Chinese heritage when I watch Mulan with the kids, I am taping white rabbits to the backs of tags to include with online orders, I am googling dumpling recipes and calling my cats my foo dogs. One of them is protecting the house from raccoons, and the other from evil spirits, both of them my lucky charms on this perilous journey.

In any case, I am hoping you all had an auspicious start to the lunar new year. If you didn’t get quite the fresh start you hoped for with January 1st, maybe this is a second go-around, and one with good food at that, whether it’s hot pot with family or take-out from Congee Queen.

Keep your eyes open for the good omens that come with a new moon, and don’t forget to write them down.

From my good luck orange to yours, happy new year.