Monday Soup

For last week's Monday night dinner and a movie at Chez Jelly, I was still in the comfort mode of cooking. And what could be more comforting than a hot bowl of soup? Mmmm mmmm good! So, I decided to make me some wonton soup. I was inspired by a post over at What Did You Eat? I had picked up wonton wrappers in the freezer section at HomePlus, and bought some ground pork and frozen shrimp - and all the other ingredients at my local supermarket. I still had couple of containers of chicken stock I had made previously. I'm going to refer you back to that 1st link to Sher's site for the recipe. As usual, I read it, but didn't follow it to a T. I'll give you the lowdown, though.

You mix some ground pork with some chopped raw shrimp. The de-shelling, de-heading, and deveining of the shrimp gnarled me out a bit. Ah well. Oh, chopped green onions were tossed in, as was a mix of egg, soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger, and white wine. I didn't have sherry. Here be that:

This was before it was poached in some water for about 3 minutes or so.

Then, a little spoonful of the mixture was placed in the centre of the wonton wrapper and the edges were sealed with water.


The recipe Sher refers to calls for a finicky way of cooking the wontons. I just went for straightforward boiling them for awhile until they looked like they wanted to come out. Then I ladeled over some broth.

And presto:

Wonton Soup!

Meh.
The wontons were difficult to manage with the chopsticks. They fell all apart, and they tasted, uhhhhhh, just okay. No big deal. The broth, though, was outstanding. I had defrosted it and heated it with a couple slices of ginger. Deeeeelish!

So the next night, with a LOT of filling left, I wondered what it would be like to try to make some "guhn mandu," which is fried dumplings.

Interesting.

I cooked them just a little too long. A couple of them, which had been sealed properly, puffed right up like balloons. Those wrappers aren't like normal mandu wrappers here, they cook fast and get super crisp. The sauce - a regular fried mandu concoction - soy sauce, vinegar, and gochu-garu (hot pepper flakes) didn't pair well. I think a plum sauce or chili sauce would have been more in order.

Overall, I'm going to stick with frozen packaged mandu - I love the chap'che (glass noodle)ones from time to time, when I want fried dumplings. And as for wonton soup, yogeyo:

The bluriness is because this was just now pulled out of my freezer. Apologies. You might find these in your freezer section at major supermarkets in Korea. They're from Thailand and they're shrimp wontons. Very yummy. I defrost them and just add boiling water and a splash of light soy sauce. Excellent for breakfast, and a lot less hassle than trying to make your own!

Oh, and the movie was a Korean one, the one which features the omnipresent Korean version of "Ave Maria" (the Debra Harry tune.) Kind of an interesting take on the plastic surgery phenomenon here. It had it's moments, but I ended up fast forwarding through the last quarter of the movie. It was like my soup. Meh.