Neuroscience & Novelty
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed & stuck in the mundane this one is for you. As someone who can be partial to overthinking, the best way I combat my thoughts is by doing something. My go to’s are the gym, walking & watching movies. With the winter weather in Ireland, walking became less & less appealing. The novelty of binging movies eventually wore off. I decided I desperately needed to expand my horizons.
Since I was quite young, I’ve always loved cooking. My sister & I would watch good food network on repeat & try out new recipes. Special shout out to Guy Fieri who made me disappointed with 90% of family dinner’s & who played a huge part in my snacking habit. It’s practically impossible to watch the cookery channel all day without getting the urge to raid the presses.
As I got older, I would help out with making family dinners & cooking started becoming more structured & efficient rather than experimental.
The past few months, I decided to try and be more intentional with making time to cook & specifically try new recipes. Each week I research recipes that I haven’t tried, and I give them my best shot.
On todays blog I’ll share the recipe for Yaki Gyoza’s. Yaki Gyoza’s are the most common style of Japanese dumplings. They are generally filled with a mix of ground meat & vegetables. For my Gyoza’s, I followed the BBC Good Food recipe online.
View the full recipe & Method by clicking the following link.
2 tbsp corn flour, 26 ready-made gyoza skins, 2-3 tbsp vegetable oil
For the filling
4 spring onions, 2 large leaves of Savoy cabbages, 1½cm piece of ginger, gralic
50g water chestnuts, 2 tsp soy sauce,2 tsp oyster sauce, 1 tsp cooking saké, sesame oil, 140g minced pork
For the soy dipping sauce
2 tbsp soy sauce, 1 tbsp rice vinegar, 2 tsp sesame oil
For the yuzu dipping sauce
2 tbsp soy sauce, 2 tbsp Yuzu juice 2 tsp peanut oil
You can find all of these ingredients in any good specialty Supermarket. Since making these, I definitely have a renewed appreciation for gyozas as making them certainly is a labor of love.
I found the gyoza skins quite fragile, so you have to be patient when separating them which is time consuming. Assembling the gyozas is also quite tedious ……. and we haven’t even started cooking them yet. In terms of cooking, you first lightly fry the Gyozas before steaming them for five minutes. I made thirty-five gyozas, so I did three batches of frying & steaming. For me, the gyozas were delicious and the Yuzu dipping sauce is a must try.
I shamelessly paired the Gyozas with Gara masala Koka noodles which I bought in the specialty shop. I know this is a crazy call. And I will admit that I did fry some of the gyoza’s on both sides and perhaps for a little too long occasionally.
That being said, the effort was worth it & done is better than perfect. I’d definitely recommend trying the recipe.
