The Dashi-board

We spent a day with Nic’s grandmother a few weeks ago to learn how to make those delectable dim sum treats: steamed barbecue pork buns!

We made a smaller batch that turned out pretty close to the original.

• 700 grams white unbleached all-purpose flour (Canadian all-purpose, mind you)
• 60 grams margarine (unsalted)
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoons salt
• 1 tablespoon yeast (quick-rise)
• 2 cups lukewarm water
• Filling! We fried up some ground pork with soy sauce, oyster sauce, onions, garlic, and a tin of tomato paste. Not the same as grandma makes it (unless your grandma is Italian), but still awfully tasty in a steamed bun.

Mix the flour, margarine, baking power and salt. In another container, mix the yeast and 1.5 cups of the water. Then combine everything and mix well. With 1.5 cups of water, it will be too dry, so add more water until you get the right consistency. If it ends up too wet and sticky, just add a bit more flour (at most 1/8c at a time; it doesn’t take much!). The dough should be soft and pliable, but not get stuck to your hands. The amount of flour versus water will vary every time you make it, depending on the moisture content of the flour and the relative humidity of the day.

Pull off balls of dough about halfway between golf ball and raquet ball size, and flatten into a pizza crust shape. Dollop a LARGE gob of filling into the middle. Then go around the edge, pulling the dough together gradually to form a cup, and then a ball around the filling. Place on squares of wax or parchment paper, keeping damp cloth on the top to keep them from drying out. When they’re all ready, space them out nicely in a steamer. Ours were a bit too close, but we had 2 extra buns, so squeezed them all in anyway. Steam over boiling water for 20 minutes. Be careful when you take them out, as they’re quite hot.

Enjoy steamed barbecue bun goodness!

Mostly green ones, actually. Does anyone have some good recipes?

Along with harvesting all the tomatoes, I removed all the plants, since it was a nice warm weekend, and I didn’t feel I would be as interested in doing cleanup on a cold windy day! Quite the stalk on this one, eh?

The tomatoes grew a good 10ft in the air, up through the apple tree. Just insane. I only wish they’d gotten more warm sunlight and ripened properly. Most of the ripe tomatoes quickly split down the side and rotted before I could harvest them.

In the Bon Voyage! album, photos are posted for a few trips we’ve done over the last few months.

After trying for 15 minutes to remove the old bolt with the Dremel rotary tool, Nic proclaimed that we would purchase a new toilet. Then there was how whole-heartedly I agreed!

Given the rain today, we decided to try attacking things inside the house. The most grievous of which was the suspected-leaking toilet upstairs. After flushing one day, we noticed water coming in through the kitchen ceiling… Thankfully, it was through a screw hole, so hadn’t actually saturated the drywall into leaking through. We now have a nice 5cm hole where I removed soggy drywall, and to let the whole area dry out.
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Not that there’s much there right now. But still, now that it’s there, we have no excuse to not post!

UPDATE 2008-08-26: Nic prodded me into uploading our nicandtaaviswedding.ca photo gallery. Somehow, just tossing the g2data directory up and restoring the g2_ database tables seems to have been enough for gallery2 to work with! It walked me through the upgrade procedure, and all is now dashi.

Hi! This is our new space for sharing stories, thoughts, pictures and other stuff.