Jiaozi

There's a little Asian food store down the street from my house, but previously I had been buying all my groceries from Wegman's, which does a nice job with the international foods. I had heard though that stuff was cheaper here, and if you went on the day of their shipment, you could find some fresh veggies too. Inside it's super cluttered and it's almost hard to walk around. There were so many weird things here without any English written on them. The meats were kinda out in the open, and you had to scoop them up yourself an drop them in a plastic bag (I don't think I would eat it even if I was a meat eater). Everything else was pretty good looking, and I spent a while in here having a hard time deciding just what to get.

I ended up deciding to make chinese dumplings, or jiaozi. I bought some premade wrappers, napa cabbage, ginger, onions, and tofu. I chopped up the ingredients and sealed them in the wrappers by wetting the edges of the wrappers with water. I then fried them in sesame oil and steamed them until they were finished. I served them with a chili sauce I found at the store. According to my Taiwanese friend that's more of a potsticker recipe, but it came out tasty nonetheless. For dessert, I took some of the remaining wrappers and filled them with sweetened adzuki beans, which I think is a little more Japanese inspired. Although I probably screwed up the authenticity of these recipes, they still turned out pretty damn good.