Shimmy Shimmy Coconut

My poor unfortunate Toshiba satellite M60 had a fit and died two weeks ago, taking all of my work files and pictures with it! But thanks to the awesome IT team at work I was able to salvage my data. That said, it doesn’t look good for little bluey (my laptop) and I’ve been on blog strike until the shock wore off. But I’m back now…

I’ve blogged about these before and mentioned at the time that I was attempting to make them at home because they were so delicious. I recently stumbled upon a recipe on a blog (that I now can’t find a link for!) from Madhur Jaffrey’s A Taste of the Far East for scallion (spring onion) bread. The image looked similar to what we’d had previously at Dumpling Inn and the only ingredients needed were plain flour, cold water, hot water, shallots, sesame oil, vegetable oil and salt. Sounded easy enough! The most time consuming part is preparing the dough, so if you use this recipe be prepared to make the dough a few hours in advance and spend some time rolling the pastry and a sesame oil roux in a fashion not too dissimilar to making a croissant (ok, its not like it at all except for the rolling of a fat into dough, then repeating the process again). As soon as I can find that other blog, I’ll post the recipe, however the end results were good but not as great as the Dumpling Inn shallot cakes:

Next time I think I’d quickly fry the shallots with some garlic and salt before filling the dough and I would probably bake them instead of frying them as they were a little greasy.

Slowly, my meat-eating friends are starting to integrate vegan foods into their lives. It helps that I force feed them vegan baked goods whenever I get the chance. One restaurant that has made it particularly easy to get my friends to eat tofu is ‘Dumpling Inn’ at Jamison shops. Since one fateful night late last year, we have been going to this restaurant at least once a month ( and more like once a week) and we pretty much order the same things:

Sizzling bean curd - the sauce is either a plum or sweet and sour sauce as far as we can discern, and is thick and perfectly balanced in flavour. I dream about this dish (not really, but it is good enough that I could dream about it) and pretty much crave it most days.

Bean curd with hot rock salt - oh the garlic and salty goodness of this dish! Very few restaurants have made this as well as Dumpling Inn.

Four season beans with mince pork (minus the minced pork, of course) - a recent addition to our order. Frankly, it doesn’t compare to the tofu dishes, but it is quite nice in its own right.

One of my friends (a seasoned Chinese restaurant frequenter) suggested getting the shallot cakes (which I will likely blog about my attempt to make these soon enough) as an entree and I thank her for that as they were so delicious. The picture is blurry and doesn’t do them justice - tastewise:

One of my friends is very anti-tofu and he seems to have no trouble eating his fair share of these dishes (the truth is, I wish he didn’t like them at all - more for me that way)!

All in all Dumpling Inn is a cheap, really tasty dining experience with friendly service that makes it well worth the very frequent visits.