Spicy Pork Wontons with Dipping Sauce

This week I’m celebrating the Chinese New Year with food! I’m preparing a few of my favorite dishes, well at least the easier ones, kicked up a bit with spice! I’ve been looking for simple recipes for a while and found an Asian inspired meatball recipe and thought it would make a great wonton filling. The recipe called for turkey meatballs but I wanted to work with ground pork for my wontons so I omitted a few ingredients and added some spice. This meatball/filling is so incredibly good you can make anything with it. I can definitely see an Asian inspired burger in the near future! So even if you don’t celebrate Chinese New Year you can make this recipe your own and serve it for any gathering.

Here’s what I did…I chopped up a couple of scallions, added soy sauce, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar and hot chile peppers to ground pork and mixed it up really well.

I then spooned about a tsp of meat into center of wrappers and shaped the wontons. The first couple I made were terrible but I got the hang of it once I got into my groove. This was actually fun and couldn’t wait to taste them. I felt like kid completing a really important project for school except I was going to do the grading!

Spicy Pork Wontons
recipe adapted from Smitten Kitchen, makes over 2 dozen

Ingredients:
1 lb of ground pork
2 tbsp of soy sauce (low sodium)
1 tbsp of rice wine vinegar
1 tbsp of sesame oil
3 scallions, chopped
2 hot chile peppers (Indian or Thai), chopped
wonton wrappers
canola oil for frying

1. Mix together the first 6 ingredients in a large bowl and blend well with fork. Cover and let sit in frig for at least 1 hour.

2. Line up your wonton wrappers on a board and spoon in 1 teaspoon of meat mixture in the center of wrapper.

3. Dab your finger in water and wet the edges of wrapper. Folder over wrapper to cover meat so you’ll be left with triangle shape. Grab each of the longer ends of triangle and bring together to form a little bonnet. Dab with a bit of water so the ends stick together.

4. Heat up oil in saute pan and add wonton wrappers when oil is hot. Do not let the oil smoke. Make sure its on medium heat and fry wrappers for 2 minutes on each side. Make these in small batches so its more manageable. Transfer cooked wrappers to paper towels to absorb oil and serve with dipping sauce.

I only used half the batch to make wontons and decided to reserve enough for two burger patties that I froze, then I made these spicy little pork meatballs! This is a very versatile recipe and I’m sure you can think of many ways to have this so please enjoy!!

Spicy Pork Meatballs

Just roll 1-2 tsp of meat between palms and fry mini meatballs in oil, enough oil to coat pan. Fry on medium heat for about 3 minutes making sure to fry on side first then the other. These are mouth-watering good! Definitely making these again for the Superbowl!!!