Who says that we can only be in one place at a time? Feeling the need to find a comfort zone in a foreign country, student Ilaria Corti, from Italy, talks about origins and traditions with other international students. All of this over a nice meal from their home country. For this first edition, she cooks Chinese with her Chinese friends.

‘When you eat a dish you’ve never tasted before, your life becomes 7 days longer.’ This is a Chinese proverb and something I feel very near to my way of approaching food. It’s one reason why I’ve learned to love the traditional Chinese food here in the Netherlands, something very far from what you can eat inside the standard western Chinese restaurants. I am so lucky to have many Chinese friends and last week we managed to organise a big Jiaozi ( 餃子) dinner.

Jiaozi is the name for Chinese dumplings and we could prepare them with the guide of a special guest, the grandma of my friend Mei Yun. I consider grandmas as heirs of traditional cooking practices and so it was an honour to have her as a mentor. It was immediately understandable that she is a special kind of grandma when to move from where she lived to the cooking place, she accepted to be picked up on the back of the bike of one of us; she never stopped smiling during the ride.

Age and language are not a barrier, especially when you are cooking, and Jiaozi are a perfect dish to gather together because everybody can take part in the preparation and learn from the others. Wrapping beautiful-looking Jiaozi is a form of art and only at the end I could understand how to move my fingers to do so. I received the compliments from grandma and it was the best achievement of my day. It took two hours or so to make all the Jiaozi we needed, but the time passed so fast that we couldn’t feel the fatigue, and grandma neither. At the end of the preparation she was more cheerful than before and she invited us for a group dance on her favourite Chinese songs.

My friends could not provide bowls and chopsticks for everybody, so we disposed Jiaozi on big plates in the center of the table, ready to be shared and dipped in soy sauce or rice vinegar. Homemade Jiaozi are definitely irresistible and I want to thank all my Chinese friends for sharing this amazing dish with me. Now ginger and soy sauce are never missing in my kitchen and fortunately here in Nijmegen we have a quite big asian supermarket, the Amazing Oriental, where you can find many eastern ingredients.

Here it is the recipe we used for the dinner ( 15 people):

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For the wrap:

You can buy the wraps already made at the Amazing Oriental, considering a mean of 10 Jiaozi for each person and in this way you can fasten the process and start to acquire confidence with the dough before making that on your own.

For the meat filling:

1 kg of minced pork meat

1 chinese cabbage

3 big carrots

half root of ginger

3 spring onions

3 spoons of soy sauce

2 spoons of sesame oil

salt

For the vegetarian filling:

 

300 grams of mushrooms

3 courgettes

3 spring onions

300 g firm tofu

half root of ginger

3 spoons soy sauce

1 spoon sesame oil

salt

You proceed in the same way for both. Take 2 big bowls, one for each filling. Slice thinly all the ingredients and mix them together adding the soy sauce, the oil and some salt at the end. Than take some filling and put it in the middle of the wrap leaving quite big borders around as you see in the picture. Fold them forming a kind of half moon and keep the dough with your thumbs and pointing fingers. The part of the dough held by your thumbs should stay plain but in order to close the Jiaozi you should start to create little wrinkles on the other side and fix each of them on the inner plaine part of dough. This is the hardest step but also the most satisfying, so don’t give up and keep on trying. It’s really important that the dumplings are safely closed because otherwise they could open during the cooking. The easiest way to cook Jiaozi is boiling them for about 5 minutes in hot water with a little spoon of oil in it to avoid that they stick to each other.

Prepare your chopsticks and dipping sauces, Jiaozi are ready!

And as grandma would said before leaving, man zou (慢走), take care!

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Read Ilaria Corti's blogs here