Tag: 250626

These are a sweet take on crab rangoons, only not crabby, and a little Polynesian.

• 1 8-ounce package of cream cheese
• 1 teaspoon fresh-ground black pepper
• ¼ cup (55 g) sugar
• Zest of 1 lemon (about 8 g)
• 3 ounces (85 g) drained, crushed pineapple – depending on how well you’ve drained it, the whims of the kitchen gods, and the phases of the moon, this will be about 1/3 cup
• 3 ounces (85 g) drained, canned, chopped mango – same
• 1 teaspoon dehydrated lemon juice powder (optional) – this will add a little extra zing to the wonton filling without watering it out and making it Gloopy (the eighth dwarf who the others rarely talk about)
• 30 or so wonton wrappers – you can usually find these with egg roll wrappers in the produce section of your supermarket, next to the tofu
• Vegetable oil for frying

Open the canned fruit and strain it with a fine-mesh strainer. Save the juice for a cocktail later, maybe something with dark rum and crushed ice.

With an electric mixer, beat the cream cheese, sugar, lemon zest and black pepper until it is fluffy — two or three minutes. Using a spoon or a silicone spatula, stir the fruit into the mix gently, by hand. Put the bowl into your refrigerator to chill for half an hour or so — long enough to do the dishes and clean up the kitchen a little.

Upon returning to your kitchen, open up the package of wonton wrappers and remove about half of them. They will be small, pale squares of dough, 2 or 3 inches on each side. Lay one flat on the counter in front of you. Dip a finger in a bowl of water, and run it along two adjacent edges of the wrapper to make the edges a little sticky. Spoon about 2 teaspoons of the now-cool cream cheese mixture into the center of the wrapper. Fold the non-sticky corner over the mixture, onto its sticky counterpart, to make a triangle. Seal the edges and set it aside on a plate.

Now, do that 25 more times. As you finish six or seven triangles, move them to a plate in the refrigerator until you are ready to fry them — again, trying to avoid gloopiness. You will get faster and neater at this as you go along.

Put 2 or 3 inches of vegetable oil into a medium-sized saucepan, and heat it over low heat to 350°F.

Fry two or three triangles at a time, flipping them over with a slotted spoon when the first side has cooked to a golden-brown color, about a minute and a half, and finish them off on the other side. When both sides are brown and a little blistered, use the slotted spoon to transfer them to paper towels or newspaper to drain, then wait for the oil to come back up to 350°F, and fry the next batch.

These are best hot out of the fryer, but if it’s very humid and you have to wait a few minutes to serve them, they might lose their crunch. Don’t panic. Your air-fryer has been waiting for this Moment Of Destiny.

Serve these, hot and crispy, with rainbow sherbet. A glass of prosecco would not go amiss, either.

Featured photo: Pineapple Rangoons. Photo by John Fladd.

Big flavor to go with your crunchy eats

According to Dawn Aurora Hunt, the owner and product developer of Cucina Aurora Kitchen Witchery in Salem, choosing or making a dip is a bit of a balancing act. She is proud of the dip mixes her company makes, and for her, good dips come from balancing the qualities of the ingredients.

“The flavors,” she said, “the balance of texture and flavor, the salt, the crunch, a little sweetness, all of that to me plays into a good dip. And if I’m going to serve a dip, it can be hot, it can be cold, but it’s always about the balance.”

“My connection to dip is like everybody’s connection,” she said. Who doesn’t love chips and dip? We all grew up on chips and dip and and for me party food is intrinsic to the connection between people. When we sit down at a party or we’re at a gathering or going into the summer, it’s a barbecue or it’s a cookout and there’s always a bowl of chips and either there’s guacamole or onion dip — you know, something fun. It’s something everybody looks forward to.”

So how do you get there?

“For me,” Hunt said after a moment’s thought, “what makes a good dip is the flavor profile and what it’s going to be mixed with. I’m a big texture person. If I’ve got a salty chip, then I want some kind of a sweetness to my dip. If I have a plain cracker, then I want a really bold flavor in my dip. If I’ve got a veggie, I want something really fresh that’s going to complement that, right? Because nobody’s eating dip with a spoon. I mean you could for sure — you absolutely could — but the dip is one half of a great combination. So when choosing a dip, you want to always think about what you’re going to serve it with. And sometimes you might do the opposite and go, ‘Gee, I have this bag of chips or I have all these baby carrots in my fridge that nobody ate. What would go well with that? How can we turn that into something more than it is?’ You can make a dip and now you have a fun, healthy snack instead of just a carrot.”

There are familiar, comfortable dips, Hunt said — sour cream-based ones, or guacamole — but there are whole families of dips that don’t always spring to mind as quickly.

“I love Middle Eastern types of bean dips,” she said. “I also think that we can’t discount things that wouldn’t be, that we wouldn’t think of as traditional dip, like a pico de gallo salsa, which is not cooked down. It’s almost more of a chunky salad. Or cowboy caviar — it’s made with beans and corn and chopped up peppers and you can eat it with corn chips or you could put it on top of something, or you can eat it with a spoon. I would consider that a dip as well.”

Then, Hunt pointed out, there are dip-adjacent sauces that are not actual dips but could be. “You could use chimichurri or pesto or something like that,” she said, “and put it in a dip. If you mixed that chimichurri with refried beans or something like that, and made a bean dip out of it, that could be really good.”

Featured photo: Veggie Dill Dip & Seasoning. Courtesy photo.