Rosie Thaws Out Some Pot Stickers And Makes A Great Dipping Sauce.

Back in November, I made a big batch of pot stickers and what I didn't eat then, I froze. Today I had a hankering for pot stickers, so I got the freezer bag out and let them thaw while I made a dipping sauce.

My dipping sauce ingredients: (From top left, clockwise.) Rice wine Sesame oil Thai style chili sauce Tamari sauce (Or regular soy sauce - I prefer Kikkoman.) Apple cider vinegar Toasted sesame seeds Sugar Garlic Scallion Fresh ginger

Here's Rosie's Tip #219: (And I know my regular readers already know this, but bear with me for the newbies.) Take your fresh ginger root, wrap it in plastic, put it in a freezer bag, and freeze it. That way, you always have ginger on hand. I use fresh ginger fairly frequently, but if I kept it in the fridge, it would go bad before I could use it up. By freezing it, it's always available. And the wonderful thing about frozen ginger is that you can take a chunk, nuke it for about 15-20 seconds, then you can squeeze it by hand and get lots of ginger joos out of it. You can't do that with non-frozen ginger. Just a little fact I discovered that I'll share with you. And you're welcome.

Out of that approximately 1-inch chunk, I got all this liquid.

I added in about 2 tablespoons of rice wine. maybe 4 tablespoons of cider vinegar, and ... oh 3 tablespoons of sugar. Gee, I don't know exactly. I taste as I go along and adjust as needed.

A few tablespoons of Tamari, which is a premium soy sauce. Both Tamari and soy sauce are made from fermented soybeans, but Tamari is darker, thicker, and richer than regular soy sauce. The flavor is more complex and smoother than soy sauce.

I added in a few drops of sesame oil. Sesame oil is potent stuff. Go easy on it.

I had toasted about 2-3 TB of sesame seeds in the oven and added them to my dipping sauce.

A big tablespoon of Thai chili sauce went in.

I sliced one scallion and added that.

And here are my pot stickers thawing out.

I heated my pan, added oil in, then added the pot stickers.

After browning on one side, I turned them over and browned on the other side.

Then I added some water, covered the pan, and just simmered for a few minutes.

Ta daaaaaaa! Pot stickers with dipping sauce. Oh yeah ... The chopsticks? Totally props. I couldn't use a chopstick if my life depended on it.

But I like to think I can. And chopsticks. That reminds me of a story I read, probably in Reader's Digest, years ago. Two ladies were having dinner at a Chinese restaurant and the waitress offered them wooden chopsticks. One lady got very indignant and started spouting off about the waste of the rain forests, blah blah blah, and arguing at the waitress about how her offer of the wooden chopsticks highly offended her. "NO THANK YOU," she spat out, as she pulled from her purse her very own personal traveling chopsticks ... made of IVORY. As in elephant tusk.