Dumpling Inn

Another fab meal at Dumpling Inn. We deviated a little from our usual menu and ordered xiao long bao, which is a dumpling/bun hybrid with a little bit of soup along with the filling. It's blasphemy to not consume the soup. As a kid, I would break the skin and dribble out the hot soup because I didn't want to put it all into my mouth at once. My mother would nearly pass out. Nowadays, I still do it, but dribble the soup into my spoon (Chinese soup spoons are best for this), eat the dumpling, then drink the soup.

The filling at Dumpling Inn's XLB's are ok. They use the same filling for the dumplings as they do for the XLB, which isn't a bad thing. I've had tastier fillings, but theirs is pretty good. Their skin, though, is a bit too chewy. Thick is all right, but it shouldn't take too much effort to bite into them. All in all, they're not bad at all.

We also had our usual potstickers, the pork and pickled cabbage noodle soup, and the spicy garlic eggplant with pork. The eggplant had some real kick... whew! The pork and pickled cabbage noodle soup was hearty and filling, as always. The potstickers were, oddly enough, not a showstopper. The bottoms were slightly burnt and they were surprisingly bland.

I heard another patron ask for the spicy garlic eggplant dish and loudly requesting over and over, "Hold the garlic!" For one thing, the owner (who was taking the order) isn't deaf and I detest people who think that raising their voice would make a non-native speaker understand them better. It doesn't and she understood him the first time. The other thing was that this fool is asking for a dish that is, by nature, chock full of garlic. Without it, there would be no sauce. Hold the garlic. Wow.

Granted, to each their own, but I can't help but wonder if this guy loudly orders things like chocolate cake, hold the chocolate. I was very amused.

T-minus two days to San Francisco! G., K., and I are going to look for Shanghai House, a place that should have food similar to Dumpling Inn.

Chevy's

Not much to report this week. We went to Chevy's on Monday. Chevy's is to Mexican what P.F. Chang's is to Chinese and Olive Garden is to Italian. Decent, mass-produced food that is most certainly edible and in a pleasant setting with good service. Authentic? Hell no. We don't go to Chevy's for authenticity, we go for the sweet corn tomalito, which I discovered was of Tex-Mex origins. Corn pudding, people. Masa harina, corn kernels, and sugar.

You really can't go wrong with that.

I like their flautas, which are very nicely fried with great sauces, but my meal Monday night was the 2-item combo crab/shrimp enchiladas and a fried shrimp taco. I had to order the 3-item to get the flauta. Nuts. Their enchiladas aren't the best, as the tortilla is often kind of chewy and, with the cheese, it can be a bit of a chewy blob. The crab/shrimp one wasn't so bad, texture-wise, but there was absolutely no seafood flavor in it. Very tiny amounts of frozen and flavorless crab mixed with bay shrimp. The sauce was cream-based and was quite overpowering. The website says it was supposed to be habanero-pesto. I guess so. It tasted neither like peppers or basil.

I'm crabbing a bit (pun intended), of course, and I did like my meal just fine. The taco was better, with crisp lettuce, a good chipotle aioli (which tasted like peppers and mayo, as it should) and two fried shrimp. They said "jumbo", but they were medium-sized shrimp. Note to Chevy's: bay shrimp are small, tiger shrimp are medium, and jumbo prawns are truly "jumbo". The taco's tortilla was pretty good... light and fluffy. Fresh out of "El Machino," the most. awful. name. ever. for a machine, but it is fun to watch it crank out tortillas. It's not that hard to pronounce "La Maquina," but I'll leave the quibbling over bad Spanglish for another time.

The tomalito is always the highlight of the dish and they kindly replace my beans with three scoops of it. I also really like their chips and salsa. The chips are super-thin and crisp (flour-based, I think) and the salsa is rich with herbs. Oregano's dominant, giving it a dense, smoky flavor. It mellows out the acidity and the heat of the tomatoes and chiles.

This weekend will be in San Francisco. There will be some good eats!

Tonight's dinner: homemade potstickers

Basic potstickers are pretty easy to make. We took ground pork butt, mixed in chives, sesame oil, salt, pepper, and two egg yolks (I had those on hand, but normally I'd use a whole egg). Then, we wrapped them in wonton wrappers. The only reason we use wonton wrappers instead dumpling wrappers was that the wonton wrappers are square and therefore can be wrapped corner to corner.



They're fried lightly in a few tablespoons of oil, then water was added to the pan (about half an inch of water). The pan was covered to fully cook the dumplings, then the lid pulled off to let the rest of the water evaporate. Once the water evaporates, the bottoms of the potstickers will fry some more. Once they're a nice golden brown, carefully remove from the pan.

The finished product:



We had them with Trader Joe's Mandarin Orange Chicken, sugar snap peas, and rice. It's found in the freezer section and quite excellent.