These little beauties take next to no work and are so freaking good. like, if you can make these if you know someone's coming over, you will be remembered for eternity.
So if you want to cut down on the kitchen time, i'd say first set a small to medium saucepan on the stove and pour in about a cup of orange juice, some cock sauce/hot sauce, some vinegar, and some sugar or corn syrup or brown sugar... pretty much whatever you have. i added pepper and even a small amount of chicken stock which i think made it taste really good with the chicken in the actual dumplings. anyway, that's going to boil away on med-high for, like, 20 minutes, so don't worry about it. you want a good solid boil going on.
so then you heat the oven to 350 or so and get some spray oil into the wells of a muffin tin and follow it with wonton wrapper lining. i spray a little oil onto them once they're nestled in... they get dry if you don't add at least a little oil or other fat to them, and come on. this has so few calories anyway.
now, the filling is basically a good way to use up a lot of odds and ends that you have in the fridge, but i like getting a small or 1/2 head of purple cabbage. it just looks nicer, but i realize that it's harder to find uses for the harder purple cabbage than it is for savoy or regular green cabbages, and the only major appeal for using it was a) to give a random purchase of purple cabbage its own glorious purpose (are you kidding me? a dollar for a whole head? come on!) and also b) to add some amazing color to compliment the orange coming from the reduction.
Basically this is something you should make when you have extra chicken, turkey, or even shrimp or beef hanging around waiting for a tap-in. i like the chicken, and if you were to buy a rotisserie chicken at the store, this is something that's worth buying the extra few ingredients for at the same time.
So i chopped some chicken and added some shredded carrots (i also really like julienne-ing some baby carrots, as i'm way more likely to have them in the fridge than a bag of carrots, unless it's stock time) to a bowl along with some finely sliced onions (green, red, shallots, whatever, just not a lot), some sesame oil, soy sauce, pepper, and some rice wine vinegar (enough to barely coat the bottom of the bowl... most of it should be soaked up by the ingredients... you really shouldn't have a lot of the liquid swimming around the bottom).
the rice wine vinegar isn't super-needed, but i found that it really helps soften the cabbage, and since we're not actually cooking it, i'd see this as important (but not completely necessary). you basically just mix it up (some sesame seeds here would work really well) and let it sit for a while. you can actually let this sit, marinating, for up to a day, so it's feasable to think that you could split the light workload up over the course of 2 days to considerably better results. anyway, regardless of when you actually make the mix, you just need to spoon it over each of the cups. if you are pressed for time you can yank the baking wrappers out a minute or two early, quickly top with the mixture and put them back in to both warm the mix and finish cooking.
a little note about the wrappers: when they look just-not-quite-done done, take them out. they're so dainty that they keep cooking with the heat of the pan for a few minutes after you take them out. similarily, if they look just perfectly done when you take them out of the oven, it would behoove you to unmold them and put them on a plate or even just the counter to cool to stop the cooking process.
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