It is that time of month, when the Daring Kitchen unleashes the hoards with this month's challenge. This time it is the Daring Cooks Challenge, rather than the Daring Kitchen, so if you are looking for sweets, you'll have to wait a few more weeks for that post.
In the meantime, lets get on with the technical details of this here challenge: This month's challenge, hosted by Jen of use real butter, is for Chinese dumplings, aka Potstickers!
I was pretty thrilled with this challenge as I love exploring different foods, as well as cultures through food, and I had never made potstickers before. Plus, the versatility of this challenge makes it so easy to adapt and personalize.
Jen's rules for this were very simple: the dumpling wrappers must be made by hand!
She didn't mean you had to make the dough by hand, though you could choose to if you didn't want to use your food processor (I used Bob), or that you had to make the wrappers thin as can be by hand, no you could use a rolling pin or a press for that. No, she meant you could not go out and buy wrappers for your potstickers. You had to make a dough, roll the dough, stuff the dough and form the dough. What you stuffed it with was up to you. If you steamed them, or boiled them, or pan fried them, again, up to you.
I went two ways. I both steamed and I fried. We all liked fried the best, but since I had recently purchased myself a bamboo steamer, I was thrilled to get the chance to use it to steam a set of dumplings. The steamed ones were good too, but I did like the crunch of the pan fried a bit more.
For filling, I stuck with Jen's suggestion for a pork filling, of which I have half left. I'm going to freeze the rest for the next time I make potstickers. Or alternately, tomorrow morning I'll make some more and freeze those instead. Either way, I'm making these again.
Thanks, Jen, for giving me a reason to try something new. And for choosing something that was suitable for multiple people working on (my little guy donned his apron and helped me roll the dough into snakes, flatten the individual pieces before rolling, helped roll a bit, and got the cabbage and the potstickers into the steamer for me. He also poured the dipping sauce into individual little bowls for each person at the table. Such a good helper he is!)
Daring Cooks: Dumplings times two
Daring Cooks: Its premier time!
For the past few years, I've proudly been part of the Daring Bakers. Heck, I'm proud that I was a Daring Baker before we became the Daring Bakers. Sure, I've had my complaints about the challenges from time to time, but I've gone along with all of them, and done them regardless of whether or not they were sweet or savory.
So when Lis and Ivonne announced that we would be having a second group, independent of the Daring Baker's, a group that was about cooking instead of baking, I was in. I like to think I'm a decent cook. Not a chef, but a cook. I have the occasional disaster, but mostly I do fairly well and get good reviews from my meals.
Still, if the Daring Bakers made me conquer my fear of melted sugar, what could the Daring Cooks do?
For their first month, they sent me somewhere I would not have gone on my own, making ricotta gnocchi, (from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook.) I'd have made gnocchi eventually (it is still on my to-do list), but I'd have never thought of making ricotta gnocchi. It just does not seem like something that would appeal to my family. Which was my first thoughts upon reading the recipe, "Oh boy, they are not going to like this."
Still, I pressed on. And learned something important.
I suck at hand forming a soft ricotta gnocchi.
Does that look like something even remotely edible to you?
Me either.
Which is why after butchering 9 gnocchi, I pulled out some spoons thinking, "I can't possibly make them worse."
Which was a good idea. I continued dropping a small amount of the dough into the flour, then would pick one up gently and essentially roll the gnocchi from one spoon to the other, over and over again, until I had a nicely shaped gnocchi that wasn't too floury. 
A major improvement, but they still do not look very appetizing to me.
Nor did they appeal to my guys, but being true Daring Baker testers, they stepped up to the plate, literally, and became good Daring Cook's testers.
My little guys tried one gnocchi each, served very simply with just the butter 'sauce'. No go, they didn't really like them.
My 'big' guy, the hubby, actually tried three of them. He and I agreed: they taste much better than they look, but they didn't appeal to either of us. I doubt adding in more of a sauce would have done it, it was more a textural dislike than a flavor. 
Like my comparison photo? Don't mind the wrinkles, I'm testing out my homemade light box still, made with the help of my father-in-law and brother-in-law, and had not yet gotten lights or broken out my iron to clean up the fabric when I took this picture. It's an ongoing project right now.
So my first Daring Cook's challenge is over (phew!) and now I get to wait for the next one to show up in a few days! Which reminds me, I should get moving on my Daring Baker's challenge, which I am still participating in.
If you are surfing around the blog worlds today and see a mountain of little white gnocchi, don't worry, you aren't crazy, you have just stepped into Daring Cook's land. Stop in, leave a comment, and then head over to the Daring Kitchen, pull up your Daring Kitchen mug (Lis and Ivonne, I know we have t-shirts and aprons and underwear, do we have a mug?) and sign up to join us for the next challenge.
Big thanks to Ivonne and Lis for inspiring us, pushing our boundaries, getting us cooking, all that fun stuff! You can find this months recipe on their sites (okay, not Ivonne's yet, but when her pc is feeling better, it'll be there.) Don't forget to tell them I said hi if you go visit!
