Chinese Stuffed Cucumbers

Another day of casual cooking ^ ^ Been wanting to eat this stuffed cucumber dish for a while so decided to make it myself! The light, steamed, juicy flavors def remind you of homeee. (If you're from a traditional Taiwanese family at least HAHA!)

You'll need a partial can of water chestnuts, as well as a partial can of bamboo shoots. This can be bought at most Asian supermarkets. How much you use is totally up to you.. they bring a subtle flavor and texture to the ground pork. Save the rest for another dish!

I used about a pound of ground pork.

Finely dice up some water chestnuts and bamboo shoots. I loveee bamboo shoots so I chose to use a bit more of it.

Add the diced up water chestnuts and bamboo shoots to the bowl with ground pork. To this mixture, add a few pinches of salt, garlic powder, sugar, and powder chicken stock. Don't worry about putting too little salt. Too little is better than too salty, it'll be eaten with a soy sauce mixture anyway!

Add one beaten egg to the mixture.

Mix everything together with your hands. This is the fun part! Knead it as if you were kneading dough, completely blending all the ingredients.

I used, in total, 3 cucumbers. Buy some extras so that if you have extra meat- you can always peel another cucumber and make extra!

Peel and sliced the cucumbers into big thick pieces as you can see in the picture.

Using a thin knife or spoon handle, take out all the seeds of the cucumbers. This leaves a bunch of cucumber 'doughnuts'. :D

Spoon the meat mixture into all the cucumbers, filling the doughnut hole hehe. Then top with with a bit of green onion.

You're almost done! Steam some of the stuffed cucumbers in a steamer for about 20 minutes. I have a teeny tiny steamer, so I can only steam about 6 at a time :P

20 mins later, the stuffed cucumbers look steamy and juicy! You can drizzle it with soy sauce, or follow the directions below for a sweet, garlicky soy sauce that goes perfectly with this dish.

Sauce:
Fry garlic in a few spoonfuls of oil until golden and throw away the garlic.
Add 4 table spoons of liquid chicken stock, a pinch of salt, sugar, and about a table spoon of soy sauce.
When it boils, add a cornstarch/water mixture to thicken the sauce and turn off the heat. That's it!

Here's the end product, drizzled with sauce. Yummmmm!