My mom is a great cook. I know a lot of kids grow up thinking this way, but what I love about my mom is that she still makes a lot of traditional Chinese dishes, even though she's been a Canadian citizen for over 40 years. She even makes many traditional dishes that her friends and family don't bother to make any more at home because they're too time-consuming (like zong zhi, turnip cake and Fa Cai Hao Shi).
Now that I've decided to become a better cook myself, I've been shadowing my mother in the kitchen, in the hopes of picking up some of her recipes so that I can try making them myself. A lovely idea in theory, but, as many of you know, moms who are great cooks never seem to have a "recipe" - they just throw in the ingredients and it magically comes together. Whenever I ask my mom for measurements, I get a shrug and an "I don't know, it'll just look right". Yeah, thanks mom. That doesn't help me when I 'm trying to make the dish on my own (or trying to write a recipe blog post!)
I finally managed to nail down (I hope) my mom's pork dumpling recipe. These are probably better known as "potstickers", but I've never referred to them as such, so prefer to continue calling them dumplings. They have that nice crispy brown bottom and I you can exchange the pork for another meat (or shrimp), but my mom has always made these with pork (she does, however, sometimes sub in another green for the Napa cabbage).
Make sure you get dumpling wrappers, and not won ton wrappers (they're square and thinner) so that these hold up to the steaming and frying.
