I think…

This was on the morning after I got, through the kind courtesy of Annie, my friend in KL, the lovely jiaoxi/shui jiao (meat dumplings) that her brother made for sale at RM14.00 for a pack of 15.

I was outside the house doing my gardening when I heard someone calling. I turned and saw it was Anson, Annie’s nephew – her brother’s son. It sure caught me by surprise as I was so engrossed in my work that I did not hear nor see the car. He was delivering to me two more packs of the dumplings…

…but his dad had made them differently this time around and he wanted me to try and see what I think.

I checked my Facebook messages and yes, he did PM me to tell me about them. He modified the recipe for xiao long bao (小笼包) to make this batch so inside, there was the little bit of the nice soup that one would usually find in those steamed buns…

…and he even added a prawn to the meat filling!

Yes, it was delicious and I liked how the soup was not too gingery – that is one thing I do not like so much when eating xiao long bao. However, my missus missed the koo chai (chives) in the ones we had the day before and when it comes to these dumplings, my girl prefers the pan-fried ones.

For one thing, I did oil the plate (I will always do that when steaming dumplings, our sio bee, for instance) first before steaming – Annie’s brother did specify that I must steam, not pan fry because of the soup inside. Unfortunately, the skin of some of them got stuck to the plate…

…and came apart so all the soup was lost. Maybe I did not add enough oil or perhaps, we did not steam them right, I wouldn’t know…and I was wondering how come Annie’s brother did not make them looking like xiao long bao so he would be able to sell them as those instead of them looking like jiaoxi on the outside. Of course whatever they looked like did not matter much to us – what was most important was they were very nice and we did enjoy them.

Thank you so much to Annie’s brother for letting me have a go at these and thank you once again to Anson for going through the trouble of sending them over to the house.