Okay, here you go, a quick recipe for Friday. Lately, as you may know, I’ve been committing to this whole “Fresh Table Experiment” thing — blah blah blah, eat locally, or organically, reduce intake of processed foods, frequent local farms and markets, and what-nottery.

So, I wanted to make dumplings.

But, I didn’t have the time to go out to the grocery store, and the grocery store is generally verboten. Generally.

So this is what I cobbled together, and I’ll note right now that I cheated a little bit– I did use prepackaged wonton wrappers, which is a no-no, I should’ve made my own. But a guy’s only got so many hours in his day for goddamn dumplings. Don’t yell. Anyway, here’s what I had on hand, and what I did with it.

Ingredients

Half pound ground pork

Half pound ground beef

Wonton wrappers

Picked peppers from the farmer’s market (enough to comprise half-a-jar, or maybe one whole pepper cut and brined)

Sesame oil

Salt, pepper, cornstarch, ginger, five-spice

What I Done Did

Take all that crap that isn’t “wonton wrapper” and chuck it in a food processor. If you want amounts, okay, fine. A “pinch” of the spices, two TB of the cornstarch, two TB of the oil. Oh, also throw in there a splash of the brine from the pickled peppers.

Blend until it makes an oogy paste.

Then, I do the Good Eats method of perfect potstickers — each wrapper gets a TB of meat-mix, wrap ‘em up like little coin purses, fry ‘em in a leetle bit of tempura oil over medium-high heat for two minutes, then toss in a splash of chicken broth or stock to loosen them up, cover and cook for another two minutes.

Pull ‘em out, and do the next batch.

What I Done Did After That

Well, ate them, obviously, but before that, you need a dipping sauce. Mine’s never as good as the Chinese restaurant’s, but oh well. Last night, I did equal parts soy sauce, sesame oil, and rice wine vineg — I’m sorry, what’s that? I didn’t have rice wine vinegar on hand, like an idiot? Oops. So I went ahead and used pear-flavored white balsamic. Turned out nice.

Plus, then I did asparagus and spinach in the same pan with oil, salt, pepper, a splash of soy. Not the pan for long; just until the Popeye fuel wilts.

Then, we ‘et ‘em. Chomp chomp chomp. Yeah.