Fire and Pesto: My Dinner Impossible at Chow's

This is my latest article as Local Flavor magazine's resident cooking clown.

Local Flavor is a semi-monthly food and lifestyle magazine in and about Santa Fe, New Mexico.

They say a watched pot never boils. You wouldn't have to worry about that in my kitchen, since I can't even stand there and wait for it to come to a simmer before I remember something I have to chop or wash or mash or bake . . . or maybe this seems like a good time to start a really ambitious dessert.

Inevitably I forget about the pot, which boils over, spilling chocolate or chicken broth or pasta water everywhere. While I'm trying to repair that disaster, without a doubt a pan of glazed carrots, cranberry sauce, or perhaps scalding milk will overheat and cause a sticky mess to ooze down the front of my oven door. Meanwhile, there is so much smoke from the oil I am heating to roast mustard seeds (because I'm such a gourmand) that I have to turn on the overhead fan. The fan is so loud it prevents me from hearing the timer that tells me my perfect sourdough dinner rolls are about to burn into charcoal briquettes.

In the end, I discover that more food landed on the linoleum than in the mixing bowl, and somehow that thing that was supposed to form into balls just crumbled into dust. My cookbook is so smeared with buttery fingerprints that I can't even read the recipe anymore, and the sink is piled so high with dirty dishes that I can't get to the spigot to refill that pasta pot. And that is, of course, when my guest arrives.

That's when I put on a big smile and say those three precious words . . . "Let's go out!"

"You want to do what?!"

That was Richard Zeng's response at first when I said I wanted him, the owner of Chow's Chinese restaurant on St. Michael's Drive, to show me how to make my favorite dish, firecracker dumplings, right there in the Chow's kitchen. And he didn't even know about my personal . . . ahem . . . history with cooking.

Now I have been writing for Local Flavor since 2000, and I've been attempting unsuccessfully to cook gourmet meals for longer than that. My feeling is: I've paid my dues to the restaurant world. Now I want what every foodie wants—a personal lesson from a gourmet chef.

"But it's a secret recipe!" he exclaimed.

I said I wouldn't leak the recipe. I promised. (Sorry folks, I promised) So with some trepidation, he agreed to do this very unorthodox thing.

Naturally then, I was surprised to find that as soon as I got there, Richard started leaking secret information like Scooter Libby. He handed me a glass of Chows' trademark iced tea, for instance, and told me how it's made. Exactly. There is mint involved. Orange juice too. An hour of preparation. Anyway, I'll take the recipe to my grave, but you can bet I'll be in my kitchen for the next few weeks trying to duplicate it. (In case you come over and see me with one foot in a puddle of lemon juice, the other in a pile of spilled tea leaves, various juices splashed all over the cabinets, and me yelling "you're not supposed to do that!" at a boiling pot that's spewing pulp everywhere like organic fireworks.)

Next, Richard introduced me to Chef Li Chang Ling, who was to be my instructor. I tried to explain to her that I was going to be a tough case. I told her she would have to carefully demonstrate every little technique because I don't have a natural affinity for cooking. It's really the tasting I excel at, I told her. I even admitted that my fascination with food stems from my total inability to actually produce it in any way. I explained that I was going to need to understand the crucial timing issue for each component of the meal as well as all the essentials for rolling out the dough. I made it clear that even the mixing aspect was likely to be a tricky one. I would need to know the number of strokes needed to achieve the proper consistency and the actual mixing method as well—whether folding, whisking, or stirring with a wooden spoon. I explained that I am well read on all of these techniques, although I can't seem to do any of them properly. I told her not to leave a single stone of culinary knowledge unturned.

I also told her I would do anything she said because I love, and I mean I LOVE, firecracker dumplings. The only thing I don't like about them is that you don't get enough of the tangy green sauce with an order. I wish I could have a huge bowl of it . . . no, a bathtub full of it . . . Li Chang Ling put up a hand in the international gesture for stop.

She didn't understand a word of English. She slapped some plastic gloves on me, patted my hand as if to say "it's going to be okay," and her fingers made the jump into hyperspace. She started folding dumplings a mile a minute.

I think someone had tipped her off about me, because the dumpling wrappers were already prepared and cut into perfect little squares. The filling itself was also all ready. All I would have to do is actually place the filling in the wrapper and fold it like an origami crane, with one hand. But the chef was doing something human fingers shouldn't be able to do. I wondered if she had special hands. Perhaps her fingers were double jointed. She continued to smile and demonstrate. She slowed down to just under warp speed to enable me to catch up.

You put a little egg yolk on the corner of the wrapper, then a little dollop of filling in the center. You fold one corner over to the other and make a triangle. Then the other two corners somehow connect with each other without making the filling ooze out the cracks. I made a couple. I thought they looked okay. Richard looked on. He and Li looked at each other. I made a couple more. They looked good to me. Still, there was silence from my instructors. I made one more. Then there was laughter.

Always there is laughter. I tell you what, I have traveled abroad enough to know that silence followed by laughter is never what you want to hear when you are out of your element and people are speaking a different language.

"They are upside down," explained Richard.

Who knew dumplings could even be upside down? I corrected the problem, and Li demonstrated very v-e-r-y slowly how to hold the dumpling just so, press its belly with your middle finger, and connect the corners in a little circle. I mastered it! Incredulous at my success, I gleefully made ten perfect dumplings.

Then we went to cook them.

Chinese kitchens are fun because there is tons of fire everywhere. The set-up consists of several woks suspended over open gas flames that shoot out from big wide tubes. No burner needed. The flames are controlled with a big lever, like something a mad scientist would have in his laboratory. You turn the lever a little bit and flames leap out of the tube like crazy. This is why Chinese people don't have big eyebrows. They're always singing them off. Just kidding.

With the Chinese equivalent of a slotted spoon, I transferred my dumplings from the plate into a wok of boiling water. I was instructed to keep the water boiling very lightly so that the dumplings didn't fall apart. I turned the lever up to get it going, at which point everyone made sounds of panic as it instantly turned into boiling whitewater. I turned the lever down, and instantly the boil subsided. The ultimate gas stove! A little up, a little down, and we soon had the dumplings boiling nicely. After five minutes I plated these babies and we headed over to chef Li Chao, who was manning the food processor.

As we deposited spinach, basil, cilantro and about a hundred secret ingredients (the names of which I will never disclose even under torture) into the machine, Richard explained to me that this is actually a French sauce. It's a pesto, basically. In fact, the dumpling filling is made primarily from turkey and carrots, not the traditional pork. He developed this dish to appeal to the American palate, which leans towards more low-fat meats.

There are, he assured me, no turkeys in China. Nor is there pesto. So firecracker dumplings are a twist on the traditional idea of a dumpling. Fusion techniques like these are what has put Chow's on the map, what earned the restaurant 16 years of success in Santa Fe and two more Chow's restaurants in Albuquerque. Having developed this special niche in the food world, Richard Zeng invents and serves dishes like coffee chicken, peanut-butter wasabi sauce, and fried wontons with parmesan cheese to demonstrate his culinary bravery.

Even I could not screw up the sauce. We whizzed it all together for a couple of minutes, and it was done. I dolloped the sauce onto the dumplings, then we took it out into the dining room and tucked in. Delicious!

The best part was that finally I got to have my dream come true: an entire soup bowl of that outrageously addictive spinach pesto all to myself. People were watching, so I couldn't just drink it. I tried to keep calm.

I added an extra dollop . . . or two . . . or three . . . to each dumpling.

Then I marveled . . . It tastes just like it's supposed to! And hey, I made it myself! It's kind of a heavy responsibility I'm carrying now, having that secret recipe in my head. Sure, I've been harassed. I've been threatened. Other restaurants have approached me with attractive offers. But the secret of firecrackers dumplings is safe with me. You'll have to go to Chow's and try to taste all the secret ingredients yourself. Or you could just stop by my house and peek in at the mess I'm going to make this week.