Jiaozi and abalone

When we had heaps of carrots and celery leftover and i didn't want minestrone soup, i decided to make Jiaozi instead. These chinese dumplings are traditionally filled with pork and chives, but really you can use any sort of vegetable as it'll be chopped up into tiny pieces anyway so you wouldn't be able to tell what's in it. I used 200g of pork to make 25 dumplings.This is a great way to stretch meat if you're on a budget! 

The wrappers were quite easy to make, surprisingly, but time consuming. Basically it's just bread flour and water that's kneaded and left to sit for awhile before being cut into pieces then rolled out into circles. They're really tasty pan fried or boiled, and dipped in a vinegary soy sauce. However, since they're labour intensive, these are best left to those Saturday afternoons where you're not in a hurry and want something fun to do with friends.

 above is an abalone our friend caught. I'd never had abalone in my life and wasn't sure how to cook it. I didn't even know what parts were edible ! anyway, after some internet and youtube research, we managed to sort of clean it and cut away the black bits.

 Gav stir fried it with chili and garlic, and we had it with rice and stir fried asparagus. It was kinda tough....dont know if it's meant to be? maybe we should've pounded it with a mallet to tenderize it. Ohwell, so that was my first abalone ever!

and, our "baby". He's turning 1 this month!