Wonton Wonders

We made spaceships the other night. I mean wontons. Have you ever made wontons?
I hadn’t until this past weekend and I don’t know why it took me so long to try making them. They were really very simple and deliciously good. I’d thought about making them in the past, but it wasn’t until our favorite Chinese place packed up and headed across town…to a location too far for us to grab take-out and now in a bowling alley no less…a place we don’t typically think about going to when we’re thinking of having a nice dinner out…that finally I was more or less forced to make them if we wanted our wonton fix. Which we really did. We even ate at China in Epcot while on vacation in hopes of getting some good wontons, but there were no wontons to be found on the menu anywhere!

While I was making wontons, Hub made chicken vegetable curry stir-fry, a relatively new (tasty!) dish he concocted. I searched online for some recipes and to learn the method for making them, but mostly all I could find were recipes for crab cream cheese wontons. But I noticed that many of the recipes used garlic powder and green onions. So I omitted the crab, used a dash or 2 of garlic powder, 2 to 3 finely sliced green onions, added about 2 teaspoons of shredded carrots (I'm addicted to shredded carrots lately and have been adding them to most everything!), and mixed this together with about 4 ounces of cream cheese. We bought some good, all-natural wonton wrappers from Whole Foods. I cut each one in half and placed about a spoonful of the cream cheese filling in the center. Then I sealed and folded them using a bit of water placed along the edges with my fingers and again at every point where I folded them. (Online, they also said you could use egg whites to help seal them but I think water worked just dandy.) I didn’t really know what I was doing with the folding but this was the fun part. Hub and I were each taking turns at trying to figure out the best way to fold them. We decided my spaceship-looking ones were the best method for frying (more flat) and eating too (by providing a little pointy handle to hold onto). I fried them in a low pan with a bit of olive oil on each side until golden brown (about 3-4 minutes).

Hub said they may just be the best cream cheese wontons he’s ever eaten. But it might just be that they were actually still hot by the time we ate them, unlike the so-often room temperature standard take-out type. Oh, and don’t forget to dip them in duck sauce (sweet and sour sauce)…that’s a must!