We’re serving up something a little different for today’s Friday Feast – two links out for Pot Stickers (Gyoza) – and sharing a short story about one of our family’s birthday traditions.
Nearly thirty years ago, as I was finishing up my postdoc medical training, my lovely wife and I interviewed with a team in Albuquerque with our then newborn daughter in tow. The practice opportunity wasn’t a good fit, though we fell in love with the very unique tricultural amalgam that is Albuquerque.
Ironically from a food perspective, one evening our hosts took us to an astoundingly good Japanese restaurant (the name of which for the life of me I can’t recall), where we dined on the uber-specialty of the house – a collection of all the house specialties served on an imposing model ship (6 or 7 feel in length) carried into our dining area by four of the staff.
The ship was endowed with dozens and dozens little nooks and crannies filled with food treasures of all shapes and sizes, including a fascinating and tasty array of gyoza (potstickers). Immediately upon our return to SLC we began a quest to reproduce our favorite pot stickers using a recipe that was tasty, reliable, and efficiently reproducible (as best can be for pot stickers).
It took a few years, and lots of trial, error, and tasting trials, though we finally (in our pre-Primal/Paleo days) settled on this recipe (note the posting date in 2012), which at the insistence of the entire family became our go to birthday meal for most of the past two decades.
Over the past few years as our nutrition plan has become Primally-aligned, we’ve taken to forming the filling mixture (swapping the soy sauce out for tamari and dropping the corn starch) into oblong patties and sautéing, grilling, or roasting them, and wrapping in lettuce leaves (with a great dipping sauce or two of course), which in all honesty, we now find more tasty than the original.
For those who can’t imagine life without a pan-fried or steamed pot sticker or gyoza in a crispy wrapping, try this one (Paleo Potstickers from Nom Nom Paleo). They’re beautiful, though the dough from scratch endeavor is an impressive undertaking – I agree the tortilla press is an absolute game changer here. And I have to admit, Michelle’s wrap dough recipe is the best gluten free alternative we come across.
So today, in honor of our now young adult offspring’s birthday today – yep, they were born on the same day – it’s pot sticker day!
