Who Woulda Thunk It? Canberran Prawn & Pumpkin Dumplings with Spiritual Spin

I like “who woulda thunk it” moments. 

Those instances where, as Tim Winton says, we are “moved from a fixed position”.

Who woulda thunk it? Pumpkin and prawn dumplings at a joint in Canberra, the Dickson Dumpling House (2 Cape St, Dickson ACT). Outstanding. 

In the one corner, we have pumpkin which I think of as “foona” – food as comforting as a heavy doona on a cold night (something Canberra specialises in besides politics).

In countless cafes during countless lunch hours, Aussies count on pumpkin to make things better in the ever-available pumpkin soup. And, in many homes from Parramatta to Coolangatta to all the other atta’s, it’s still the stuff that binds families together during Sunday roast dinners.

In the other corner, baby prawns (a.k.a, shrimp on the "Up Over" side of the planet). I reckon there’s no food more celebratory than the prawn.

The excitement of Aussie Christmas. The pink mountains on ice at a special-occasion hotel buffet. The guilty pleasure of a bowl filled with prawn shells after we stuff our “just one more” faces down at the Pyrmont Fish Market.

Here we have them together in one morsel. Joy and reassurance. Exuberance and stability. The celebratory and the day-to-day. East and West. Big night out and at home on the lounge in front of the telly.

You madly run around the playground with the prawns and then you get to jump on your mother’s lap with the pumpkin.

Or, the prawns are the screaming guitar solo to the pumpkin rhythm section's steady beat. (At Dickson Dumpling House, the bass was beautifully played by a Malaysian beef fried rice heavy on the tomato.)

So, yeah, I liked ‘em. They were yum. And, they sent me into a spiritual spin.

Here’s something to shock you. I sometimes struggle to make my beliefs (and my writing) orderly.

Indeed, I can be described as “Christian by faith, Ukrainian Catholic by culture, Buddhist by practice, and Islamic and Jewish by respect”. I wonder aloud if it’s self-indulgent – this bespoke Bushido of mine.

A friend with a big beard, a big hat, and a big heart gently reminded me of the luxury of my musings this week. (He isn't the serious dude making the Canberra dumplings pictured.) 

And, I’ve listened to a fine and fired-up preacher point out that when we abandoned core truths, when everything becomes personally-determined and relative, there can be a world of hurt. Bottom line: when we become our own god, right and wrong and obligation to others are seriously at risk.

Smart blokes, them. God guys. Humble guys who know tradition and history. I need to get them around a bowl of pumpkin and prawn dumplings but.

Here we have this fusion; here we have this new and improbably good thing that is created by different traditions; here we have been given, as no other generation before us, this opportunity to experience so much of the world and it’s wisdom so readily.

Are we wrong to dabble? I dunno.

Maybe, some stuff just works to get us out of bed. To remind us to be kind, helpful and thankful in our daily lives. To inspire us to build and beautify. To appreciate the divine in the little. Indeed, in the dumpling. 

Who woulda thunk it?

Loud-Mouth White Dude Descends on Dumpling Factory

When I am lost in the dark, sometimes I go faster and make lots of noise. Or, in the inverse of what American novelist E.L. Doctorow recommends, I drive beyond the high-beams.

So it was in the closet-like kitchen of Beijing Dim Sim Food Pty Ltd (51 Adderton Road, Telopea, NSW, Australia), which I basically crashed into earlier this week.

A very large and bearded white man being ever more exuberant and hyper-curious, as five Chinese dumpling makers went about their gentle trade of making gow-gee, dim sim, shallot pancakes, spring rolls, and pork buns.

When you point with your chopsticks (and show really bad form) at the cart rolling past at a some crowded yum-cha palace in western Sydney on a Sunday morning, it’s likely that you have Annie to thank for the magnificent morsels that come your way.

Since 1997, her Telopea-based, dumpling-making shop-front factory supplies dozens of Chinese restaurants and Asian grocery stores. Looking like snowballs in a Glad bag, some retail dumplings are also sold out the front. 

To get my admission into the kitchen, I bought a bag of fish-filling gow-gee and a bag of pork-and-cabbage gow-gee; the latter are Annie’s best seller.

“30 per cent pork. 70 per cent cabbage. Salt and pepper. Little bit soy sauce. Very healthy. People want very healthy,” Annie tells me.

I am glad that something healthy, nourishing and profitable comes from a hard heart. Not Annie’s – Telopea’s.

If Telopea doesn’t mean ‘lonely ass place’ in an Aboriginal dialect, maybe it should.  Housing Commission blocks like mouldy loaves of bread. Tree trunks covered in graffiti. Junk mail from Kmart blowing across the tracks of the train that comes through only once an hour.

I’m riffing with all this in Annie's kitchen - which means I’m really anywhere but the kitchen. So, what comes out are ever louder and stupider questions. “So what’s the Mandarin for rolling pin?”

I somehow squeeze through to near the best dumpling maker – 2000 plus per day. Roll, palm, place, seal. The whole action in under 5 seconds. 

Each dumpling identically formed and plump and resting in neat rows on a metal tray dusted with flour.

She’s so calm and smiling. With no English, just flicks of fingers as she continues packing her parcels, I’m invited to settle and watch. 

But, I’m still caught in my mental beach rip about how much Telopea sucks. Then, the migration status of Annie’s employees. Then, why are migrants  blowing things up in Boston and I hope my cousin and her family are safe... 

The good old monkey mind basically pushes the button for the ejection seat and I hurriedly leave the Beijing Dim Sim Food Pty Ltd shop in Telopea. The guy who runs the local grog shop next door smokes out the front and flicks the fag in the gutter as he sees me.

The soundtrack in my head is saying: “Wow, you really are an enormous dickhead.”

Then, an old Chinese man comes walking down the street. He’s got a portable speaker slung over his Lowes tracksuit top and it’s pumping out what I make out to be an exercise routine. There’s the screech of Chinese violin and a sergeant-like narrator barking orders by which to flap arms and lift legs.

He stops at the cross-walk and smiles when I ask for a photo. The pause button on my mad world is pushed. Stuff just gets calm and centred.

“Stop, revive, survive,” I am reminded of a lesson part of me just doesn’t seem to learn. Maybe, I need to go make 2000 dumplings.

Merrylands for Afghan Mantu: Dumplings Not Drive-by's Warm Hard Hearts

For mine, Merrylands isn’t the ‘drive-by shooting’ centre of Sydney.

It’s where my permanent-partner-in-dumplings (my wife, Suzi) and I have recently discovered mantu - not flying bullets.

Indeed, the Kabul House (186a Merrylands Road, Merrylands, http://www.kabulhouse.com.au), staffed by some seemingly hard men, makes marvellous mantu – Afghan boiled dumplings which are to comfort food as Lazy-Boy recliners are to lazy old guys like me.

Mantu fit snugly on a soup spoon. They’re made of very fine wonton-style dough with lamb mince and scallions filling. The filling is mixed through with what the recipe would likely say is ‘heaps’ of curry powder. This makes mantu green in colour and pistachio-like in flavour.

And just like accessories put the statement into fashion statement, what tops mantu is even better.  It’s chana dhal (think Indian cuisine), which is lentils stewed in a sweet tomato sauce. AND, a cold yoghurt and mint dressing. Right or wrong, we ate ours wrapped in a really hardy and hot naan bread from a kind of improvised tandoor oven. (Asking didn’t seem like a welcome option or was it, I wonder…)

All this adds up to a soft, really nutty, and fortifying feed. A feed that surely soothed the soul after, say, a rugged fortnight on some wind-blown ridge herding said sheep in the general direction of said dumplings.

It’s like some cook of the cosmos said: “Let me extract the comfort of many kitchens and put it in one dish.”

And, fascinatingly, all that comfort was served to us by from waiters and staff who seemed as tough perhaps as their ancestor shepherds. Not a nice word or smile could be extracted - at least according to our expectations. See painting on wall for general mood.

How’s that work?

‘

Maybe it shows the blessings and burdens visited on Afghans for being always on the cross-roads, always in-between.

Somewhere in-between East Asia, South Asia, the Caucuses, and Europe.

Somewhere in-between one empire and another one.

Somewhere in-between the last war, this war and what seems inevitably like a next one.

Somewhere in-between where many of its people are and where they want to be, such as Australia where many Afghan (including Hazara minority) asylum seekers have come in recent years.

Maybe, mantu are all about making peace with all the in-between.  

Maybe, mantu are a way for Afghans to smile when it’s best not to show it. That’s why I say thank you to the Kabul House’s guys for their kindness of the kitchen even if I can't read your faces.

Korean Mundoo, Textural Surfing, and Open-Mindedness

Stereotypes are like McDonalds – convenient but usually wrong.

So I am reminded on today’s “urbex” (urban exploration in American hipster, apparently) in Sydney’s western suburbs in search of Korean mundoo dumplings and a fitting start to the Korean New Year.

I’m this guy who prides himself on his pithy cultural observations, his curiousity and his acceptance of our diversity. Hey, I've got the patter of pluralism down pat.

But wheeling to Eastwood (one of Sydney’s Korean hubs together with Strathfield and Liverpool Street in the city), the loop in my head is saying Koreans are “tough”, “resilient”, “determined”, “all business” and “harder than the Chinese or Japanese”.  Huh?

Indeed, I’m seeing mental pictures of dudes with wrap-around shades and cigarettes yelling into their mobile phones to make sure their container from Inchon has landed on time at the Botany shipping terminal. Or, checking their kid has topped geometry at the after-school tutoring centre. Double huh?

Thankfully, my monkey mind still manages to read the signs sometimes and see the writing on the wall (literally), and show me how dumb I can manage to be. Here at Eastwood, there’s something really playful going on. More Pop Tarts than martial arts.

And so with TOBAWOO Restaurant at 104 Rowe Street on the “Korean” (as opposed to the “Chinese”) side of Eastwood train station. The official slogan is: “TOBAWOO Boasts in pork meat dishes cooked with the diner’ well-being in mind.”

The she-chef’s about 23. Cheerful and slim with a pink Yankees cap on backwards and make-up from what must be Loreal’s “steam-proof” range. The pigs on the tandem cycle on the wall look like they’re having a good time too (including with their random rhino friend).

My porcine buddies are well represented in the seafood soup with mundoo and sliced rice cakes that I order for the startling total of $10.

The mundoo are “full moon” as opposed to most dumplings’ “half-moon”. Their dough’s wrapped around like ballerina arms arching and just meeting. They’re strong enough though to hold the filling of: ground pork with chilli, ginger and garlic; jap chae  (the comforting and clear Korean potato noodles); bean sprouts; scallions; carrot slivers, and; heaps of yellowy scrambled egg. Unlike many Chinese dumplings where all filling ingredients are minced into a kind of gray pink paste, here the ingredients retain their proud independence and texture.

Textural surfing for the tastebuds seems the name of the game. 

From the spicy spikes of the mundoo to the mellowness of the fish broth to the hold-your-horses, pasta-like disks of the rice cakes to the four little side dishes: kim chee chilli cabbage; pickled and spiced tofu; lettuce with a reduced butter dressing, and; pickled shitake mushrooms.

Back and forth I go with the steel chopsticks – so skinny you could pierce your ears with them. My eating feels on my body and mind like jumping from the sauna to the spa to the pool. Sensational. 

Around me, Korean diners are, well, having fun. Lots of it. Waving steam off their soup with their phones (at least I was right about something). Toasting each other with water from the complementary pitchers. Asking for polaroids to put up the cafe's wall. On a Tuesday in the 'burbs...

The flip side of my mundoo (see below) looks a bit like a small brain rather than a baby's bum (see above). 

I am reminded that mine can be even smaller when I look at the world as I believe it to be rather than as it really is. I am reminded of all that I miss when I’m not looking in the right direction.

But hell. It’s New Year’s (Korean, that is). So, time for another resolution. 

How about this one? Keep an open mind. Truly.

Lower East Side Gyoza Walkabout

Eating my gyoza today, I recalled a Buddhist expression: "Comparisons are odious."

And indeed a life of "keeping up with the Jones" - whether it's in the material, culinary, creative or spiritual stakes - seems to me a life of always yearning and never earning. With billions of us on the planet, it's pretty good odds at the casino that there's going to be another Joneski around the corner who's smarter, more talented, drives a BMW or just can manage to keep his shirt tucked into his pants.

So, the older I get the more I make it my habit when in the presence of good stuff - be it good values, good aesthetics, good writing or good dumplings - to just say "wow" and "thanks". I'm not trying to be saintly just downright practical when I acknowledge the good stuff and stand grateful that's it's bounty has landed in my teeny-tiny corner of the cosmos.

These have come my way of recent days:

• the Ichiraku Japanese Noodle Bar in Eastwood in Sydney's suburbs, and; 
• Dr Alexander Motyl and his new novella, "My Orchidia", which is loosely about ambling about in another era with another rhythm in the East Village, loosely looking for a memorable old place that served varenyk dumplings (and pizza).

The first make a terrific "yin and yang" gyoza dumpling - delicate in its nearly translucent dough and gentle frying, but powerful in its pork and mega-ginger flavours. (Did I say mega? Well double it.) 

I always admire gyoza for being so well prepared - even when they are certainly not the main game of a Japanese ramen soup bar. An accompaniment but a very honourable one. It speaks to me of the Code of Bushido - even if that was apparently written in a bar in Philly or on breaks from repairing radiators in Bakersfield or some place else far away from your local Shinto temple.

And Alexander? Well, how beautiful is the following?

"Look, boyo, the perfect dumpling's an art form, an exquisite melding of lines, spaces, and textures... It takes Fingersptizengefuhl. That's Swiss for the tingling you feel in your fingertips after you've climbed a mountain and can still see the butterflies in the valley below."

Wow and thanks. Did I say wow and thanks? Well, double it.

Letting Go of Veggie Dumplings

To end 2012, I did a six day silent retreat at a Buddhist monastery in the Southern Highlands (www.sunnataram.org) and ate no dumplings. Until today. 

At the retreat, Phra Mana and his fellow Thai "forest monks" -  fine and remarkable men who built the pagoda at left starting with no skills, no stone and no schekels - had me meditate for many hours to train and clear the mind and, then, see things for what they are. 

Let me say this: it's a mind that needs clearing in the way an old cat lady's house does. The gear it regularly slips into is some combination of dishevelment, short-termism and a reasonable amount of optimism. 

It reminds me of the Bowery bums of my youth who used to smear stuff on your windscreen to get you to give them a buck to clean it off - and somehow managed to still mostly be endearing. Sometimes.

Today, we took my Lebowski-like noggin and Miss Suzi to vegetable dumplings and (accidently ordered) steamed BBQ pork buns at a Shanghainese restaurant in Eastwood. It's there that I really learned the monks' lesson about attachment, and all the angst it causes us, and, with clear mind and vision, letting go, and all the calm it gives us. 

Or, to quote that British Buddhist master, Mick Jagger, "you can't always get what you want."

I really wanted these dumplings. I'd thought about having a serving at retreat. I specifically looked stuff up on Al Gore's Internet. I invested in a fantasy about some luscious morsels that would somehow make my day and my existence on this planet all the better.

I had many expectations and, as I've heard from a friend, "expectations are pre-meditated resentments."

Indeed, what we got were dumplings - not some new lease on life or even a discount on my car insurance policy. A workmanlike serve of veggie ones with a finely-chopped blend of buk choy, baby bean sprouts, fungus, a touch of carrot and something else we couldn't figure out. Nicely constructed parcel of two chambers within the one overall piece. 

Bottom line: in the pantheon of great Chinese dumplings available in Sydney, they were good not great. 

And, my monkey-like mind - in full chimpanzee mode - went straight to all that really helpful monologue: why'd I waste my time and money; we coulda gone across the road to that other joint with the Korean mandu; what the hell do I write about now...

Then, I got lucky. I somehow managed to hit the pause button. I listened to myself breathe. I had another bite.  I realised something. 

It's aniseed, that thing we couldn't figure out. Wow, that's pretty cool. 

Then, I saw the Chinese couple at the table next to us using their oblong spoons to capture the soup from their xia long bao, Shanghainese soup dumplings. Wow, that's pretty cool. 

Then, I heard love in my wife's comment: "Do you want to order something else for art's sake?" 

By that time, I actually didn't want for much.

Or as Monk Mick continued to say: "But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need."