Souper Bowl Weekend

I have tackled xiao long bao, and I have won! And, since I was at it, I decided to make 4 other kinds of soup while we made the soup for xiao long bao.

So, all in all, it was a good weekend and my freezer is more well stocked than it's been in a while.

What's that you say -- there was a football game this weekend? Really??)

So the blow-by-blow on the xiao long bao is below (click on the link for the Internet version of the recipe we used... sort-of). For those not interested in my cooking conquests, here are two requisite pictures of Elli, and you can skip the rest of the post, as the below is gory detail, but I figure I better record for myself what I did so that I can remember next time I go to make them.
Reaching for the camera:

Playing with the postcard from Jeremy's parents:

Back to xiao long bao! First, you have to make a soup. The Internet recipe is an adaptation of the recipe in the May 2007 Bon Appetit. I made a few modifications (or will next time I make it):
(1) She says to use 2 quarts of water, but it's probably better to use the 10 - 11 cups of water called for in the original recipe.

(2) The original recipe called for 1 whole dried shiitake mushroom for the soup. I left that out because I'm allergic to mushrooms.

(3) I substituted turkey bones for the chicken bones (also allergic). I goofed on getting my ingredients because I got 2 pounds of turkey thighs, not 2 pounds of bones, but the soup came out just fine with less bones than called for. I just...

(4) ...threw in ham shanks instead of the ham that the recipe calls for.

(5) I used salted pork fat instead of the options listed in the original recipe for the pork skin because I thought it would be a good substitute (which it was... but probably the options listed in the original recipe are better ones).

So we made the soup on Saturday morning, and then I realized that I had extra turkey thigh meat (because I cut it off the bones that I put in the xiao long bao soup), ham shanks, green onions, and ginger. I also had extra Napa cabbage that I will eventually use as a liner for steaming the dumplings.

I looked through my cooking bible (The Joy of Cooking) and found a recipe for "Mulligatawny Soup" (pg. 100) that called for chicken (turkey) thighs and ginger, as well as a bunch of ingredients we had on hand, so we made that to use up the extra turkey thighs.

I found a recipe for Barley Soup with Sausages (pg. 101) that called for green cabbage (we substituted Napa and it was fine) in addition to what we had on hand, so we made a pot of that.

These two soups used up 20 cups of my turkey stock (which I use in place of chicken stock), so it seemed like a good time to make some new turkey broth with the same bones I used for the xiao long bao.

That left the ham shanks, but I'd been wanting to make split pea soup for a while, so we used those up in that soup (pg. 105).

After making all that soup, I was pretty tired. So we added the gelatin to the xiao long bao soup to make it into an aspic and called it a day!

Today we went to the Asian market and bought a bamboo steamer (which, by the way, works by putting enough water in a frying pan or wok to reach just below the bottom of the steamer, heating the water to boiling, and putting the steamer into the pan). We also bought a rice cooker because Jeremy needed his bubble tea and the instructions call for cooking the pearls in a rice cooker. I'm sure you can do it another way, but we make enough rice that we'll use it for its intended purpose, as well.

Tonight after Elli went to bed, we made the filling and broke up the aspic (we were fueled in this endeavor by the bubble tea from Jeremy's kit. It was very yummy).


The Internet recipe says to use a fork to break up the aspic into diced bits.... Yeah. I just ended up mushing it up a lot. I don't know if it's because the gelatin didn't dissolve all the way as it was supposed to (impatient cook!), or if I'm just incompetent, but it worked even without being in cubes.

The filling:


We cooked a few of the dumplings to make sure they tasted okay, and then froze the rest (because they can be frozen up to 2 weeks).

Cooking:

Freezing the dumplings:


Unfortunately, we do not have any pictures of the cooked dumplings because we ate them too fast. And I spent the majority of the rest of the evening telling Jeremy things like: My tummy is so full of xiao long bao! I'm happy because I ate xiao long bao! I think I'm doing well at playing Rock Band because I've eaten xiao long bao!

Seriously. They're REALLY good, if I do say so myself.