A couple months ago for my birthday I went to my favorite Boston Dim Sum place, China Pearl, for an amazing spread of all things dim sum. While I try to get there every couple months, it doesn't seem to happen often enough. A couple friends that we went with emailed a few weeks later proposing a dim sum feast at their place. We would all cook together and produce a nice range of classic and not-so-classic dim sum dishes. I thought this would be a great idea (and great excuse to try some new Asian dishes) and this past weekend, this is exactly what we did.

Trying to narrow the scope of what we would make was the first hurdle. I had gotten the new Naomi Duguid cookbook, Burma, for my birthday, so of course I would look there first. After making a list of a dozen or so recipes I narrowed it down to a handful: Fried Shan Tofu (p. 126-8) with Tart-sweet Chili-garlic Sauce (p. 36), Curried Chicken Livers (p. 158), Kachin Pounded Beef with Herbs (p. 178), and either Semolina Cake (p. 276) or Magic Rice Balls (p. 290) for something sweet. The only real dietary restriction that I had to work around was Kosher (which obviously would have eliminated a number of traditional Chinese dishes), so this list looked like a nice balance between familiar and a little more "out there" flavors.

The Shan Tofu really spoke to me because I wanted to create as much from scratch as possible, and while I do want to tackle making tofu at home soon, I wasn't ready for a community meal to be my first experiment with it. The Shan region of Burma uses chickpea flour to create a firm-tofu-like dish rather than soy beans. The preparation for this is much easier than processing the soy beans to make it edible; if one can do polenta, Shan tofu is certainly within easy reach: basically just mixing water and chickpea flour, heating it to a silky consistency then allowing it to firm up overnight and you have yourself a fantastic vegan, high-protein, allergy-free alternative to tofu. The flavor is different, and I want to play around with adding different spices to vary it even more, but it is a great home option. When cut to 1/2"-thick pieces and fried in oil, the outside crisps up quite nicely and the inside stays soft, so it is almost souffle-like.

The Tart-sweet Chili-garlic Sauce is a great dipping sauce for it. The one that I made, while it had a lot of chilies, I don't think it actually had quite enough. The one I produced was very liquid instead of being a bit more chunky, which is what I think it is supposed to be. After I go through this batch (which will be quite quickly, I'm sure) I will experiment around with more chilies and perhaps using a mortar and pestle to create the base paste instead of a blender.

The great new(ish) Somerville butcher, M.F. Dulock, has been where I've been getting meat, pretty much exclusively, since they opened last fall. The one thing they do not do is poultry (sourcing local poultry is actually a cost-ineffective model right now as there is only one slaughterhouse in Vermont to process all the area poultry and so with the added shipping costs, etc. the end price that a retailer would have to sell the birds for is around $9/lb, which is not sustainable). What this meant for my chicken livers is that I decided to go with a nice beef liver that they had in the case instead. I knew this would be a more "liver"-like taste, but with the curry flavors included in the recipe (shallots, ginger, turmeric), I knew this would also not be too much of an issue.

The Pounded Beef was going to be a fun one. This recipe called for using the mortar and pestle to pound down the cooked beef and combine it with a paste of spiced herbs (chilies, garlic, ginger, Vietnamese coriander [I used equal parts cilantro and mint]). The beef is boiled for about 20-30m and then seared, then pounded with the herb paste to create a very "pulled" texture. It was initially a bit dry, but after adding a bit of salt and letting it meld in the fridge it was less-so. On serving, I quartered limes to squeeze on. This dish would make a very good taco filling.

For a sweet finish I decided to go with the Semolina Cake (mostly due to the ease of the recipe). This was the only one that didn't really meld for me. I don't know if there was a mistake in the recipe or if there was an issue in my prep, but the cake didn't really come together. From what was described, it seems as if the brown sugar in the recipe is supposed to melt everything together to create a dense mildly sweet cake. What it ended up being was much more dry, unfortunately, though not at all tasteless. It certainly got eaten with gusto. I will attempt it again, hopefully with more success after speaking with some baker friends.

This was quite a wonderful day, with our friends adding beef bao, boiled, and fried dumplings, garlic greens, taro cake, and a really nice and very spicy chili sauce. These recipes, incidentally enough, came from Duguid's earlier book, Beyond the Great Wall. I find her (and cookbook compatriot Jeffrey Alford - who didn't assist with Burma) books quite excellent and have been enamored with them since Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet.

I was too into cooking and then eating to get any pictures, which would have made this long post much more interesting, but there we go. Until next venture...