Ingredients for Pot Sticker Soup

With its hallmark infusions of soy sauce and five spice powder, Asian cooking has been making its way around the world for more than 50 years. In a relatively short amount of time, Asia’s light and delicious rice or noodle-based recipes have become favorites for many non-Asian cultures. While some would say that sharing the recipes to these dishes has led to the adulteration of the true Chinese culinary experience, ultimately the ability for taste to adapt works both ways. Just as people adopt some of the characteristics of their environment, cuisines use the ingredients available around them, traditional or otherwise. Nonetheless, there are fundamental aspects to any ethnic cooking that must be adhered to…otherwise, what would be the point of calling it Asian cuisine?

Are you ready to learn how to make an authentic Asian cuisine? In this free video cooking class, learn how to make a traditional pot sticker soup and a Ginger slaw dish. Our expert chef will walk you through step-by-step. Learn the ingredients and cooking utensils needed, how to season your wok, how to prepare the ingredients, how to dredge and fry the tofu and tips for cooking the tofu and vegetables and how to serve the dish when finished. Try this one out one night this week, in place of that frozen meal in a bag, perhaps. Your taste buds are sure to be pleasantly surprised.

"Hi, I'm Chef A.J., and welcome to Expert Village. I'm going to show you that making healthy food can be easy, delicious, and fun. We're going to make a pot sticker soup. Whenever I have a dinner party or, especially if I'm doing Asian food, this soup is always such a big hit that people just want to eat the soup and nothing else. And it is so easy. The ingredients are readily available at your local supermarket or Trader Joe's or natural food store. First thing we're going to do is we're going to saute a pound of carrots. I'm lazy, basically, and I like to buy them already peeled, washed. And they're organic, of course. And this is a pound of them. Even though I'm a chef and went to culinary school, my knife skills were never my forte. So that's why God invented the food processor. Teaching at the Braille Institute, teaching healthy cooking to the blind also has taught me easy and safe ways to do everything. It turns out to be easy for everybody. So, I take my pound of organic prewashed and peeled baby carrots, and--by the way, if something is organic, you don't have to worry so much about peeling it--put them in the food processor. Press the button, do it a little bit more. It depends how fine you want the pieces. And that's it. This works really well in the soup. And I'm done. Now, I am going to saute these in about two tablespoons of olive oil--good quality, extra virgin olive, organic, of course. You know, it's funny. With olive oil, people assume that the most expensive is the best. And that may or may not be true. Just like with wine. But if that's true, then why is Two Buck Chuck so popular, right? But I have found that olive oil, like anything else, they taste differently sometimes. Where they're made, if they're made in Italy, if they're made in Greece, and when I do teach my culinary classes in Los Angeles, I make my students taste the olive oil, dip it in a piece of bread, because I want people to understand that the most expensive isn't always necessarily the best. It has to taste good to you. Some of them are a little more fruity, you just have to go with what tastes good to you. I happen to like the organic brand from Trader Joe's. It's reasonably priced and it's a very good all purpose olive oil for salads and soups. Two tablespoons. I have been doing this so long that I don't have to measure. Usually just two circles around the pot is enough. We just want to cover the pot."