Homemade Gyoza

A special meal with Anthony's family is gyoza, Japanese dumplings.  They are rather time-consuming to make, so we don't have them all the time.  In Uganda, we don't have them at all because they (not surprisingly) don't sell the pre-made wrappers (they're kind of like wonton wrappers) in the supermarkets around here.  Or should I say, we never had them before...  Because I found a recipe for making the wrappers from scratch and decided to try it out when we had a friend come over for dinner.  We put her to work and with three people preparing the gyoza, it wasn't so time consuming.  The power was off for the first half of the cooking, which made it a little tricky, but we survived!

The recipe and instructions for making the wrappers can be found here.

For filling, we sauteed:
2 onions, finely chopped
4 c. shredded cabbage
5 large carrots, grated
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbs. fresh ginger, minced
2 eggs

Then, we mixed in:
sesame oil
soy sauce
corn starch

You put a spoonful of filling on half of a wrapper, use your finger to put some water around the inside edge of the circle, fold it in half, and crimp the edges together.

Put completed gyoza in a saucepan with about 1 Tbs. oil.  Cook for a few minutes until browned, then pour in 1/4 c. water, cover the saucepan, and cook until the water is gone.  Then, uncover, sprinkle a couple teaspoons of sesame oil on the pan, and cook a little longer until they are nicely browned on the bottom.

This was the last batch we cooked, when the power came back on:

Just a note, don't put your uncooked gyoza on a wet cutting board because for the ones touching water, the wrapper will start to disintegrate and you'll end up with them falling apart like the ones above.  Regardless, they were great!  It was a very special treat.