If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed that the last couple years I’ve been cooking more Chinese foods which was started by a mapo tofu recipe video from Chinese Cooking Demystified. We now have a number of cooking implements, including an induction wok unit, and stock a range of pantry staples for Chinese recipes. “Fried rice”, a dish that I’d attempted in the past and failed at repeatedly, is now something we do routinely to use up leftovers.
So with that background out of the way, this recipe came up as a riff on various other ideas to try to make a tasty savory dumpling (jiaozi) filling that was vegetarian and would appeal to the kiddo. A few months ago I started trying to make dumplings from scratch. Rolling out wrappers and filling dumplings as a family is fun! Unfortunately, the most common veggie fillings I would see were various combos of minced cabbage, mushroom, carrot, etc. or egg and jiucai (Chinese chives) and the kiddo wasn’t too into them. So we’d been making a chicken & cilantro recipe as one of the fillings. I don’t recall how I got the idea of using purple sweet potato & black bean garlic sauce but likely I had just made some other kind of black bean garlic dish and we had purple sweet potato on hand.
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