Family "Faan"

My mother recently taught my husband some Cantonese.  “Sic faan” is perhaps the most essential of all phrases to know since it basically calls everyone to the table for a meal.  Seems like a fitting label for my new tradition of Sunday Chinese dinners.

For May 27^th’s Faan, I tried my hand at siu mai, Chinese greens, porridge, and tofu.  The original plan was to make sui mai with tofu, inspired by a small Chinese cookbook that’s been lying dormant in the back of the closet, mainly because I’ve already been too overwhelmed with trying to convert grams to pounds or milliliters to cups.  I was also planning to make porridge with salty duck egg whites as an accompaniment.  I ended up changing things up a bit when I did some googling in an effort to figure out what to do with the yolks!  After seeing an interesting recipe, I switched gears and used vegetarian ham for my siu mai and the only package of tofu I had on hand for this...

The siu mai came out better in my head than in reality.  I don’t know if it had something to do with the wrappers (not sure if wonton wrappers are the same as siu mai wrappers, but the wontons were the closest thing I could find at the store), but the “skin” or “pei” was sort of chewy.  The filling resembled my typical filling for dumplings, perhaps because the flavor of vegetarian ham overpowers everything else.  You couldn’t even really taste or tell that there were handfuls of baby turnip greens from my container garden in there!* A fun first try though. 

*With encouragement (and seeds) from my Master Gardener sister, I started a little container garden this year.  While I planted, my husband kept asking different questions about my overall process to which I repeatedly replied, “I have no idea what I’m doing!”  Indeed.  I recently learned from my sister that I should have only sowed one or two seeds in the relatively small pot that I selected for the turnips, rather than the hundred or so that I planted!  My plan was to thin the seedlings out (see my daughter helping) and use the baby greens to add a turnip-y bite to the siu mai.  I’m glad they didn’t go to waste but I’m not sure they added much to the flavor.