We visited my family up in Southport recently and offered to cook for them. We found ourselves cooking a Japanese feast for six! – which may have been biting off slightly more than we can chew, but it all came together in the end with a bit of frantic dumpling frying. We’ve made all of the things on the menu before, but there were a lot of component parts that all needed to come together at once, which thankfully they did.

For starters, we served a selection of salmon, prawn and vegatarian sushi and chicken gyoza dumplings.

And for mains, OF COURSE it was a chicken katsu curry. (recipe here)

My main contribution to the meal was the dumplings (adapted from the Yo! Sushi cookbook, as were all the other recipes)

• pack of gyoza skins (in the frozen section of any good oriental supermarket)
• 2 handfuls of chopped shitake mushrooms
• 200g minced chicken
• 1/2 leek, finely chopped
• 1 crushed clove garlic
• 1 tsp grated ginger
• 1 tsp toasted sesame oil
• 1 tbsp cornflour
• 4 leaves savoy cabbage (finely chopped)

Put all the filling ingredients in a bowl and mix well.

Take a gyoza skin in one hand. With a pastry brush, moisten the top half of the skin with water. Put a large teaspoon of filling in the middle.

Fold the lower half of the skin over the filling edge to edge , pressing down to stick the two edges together.

Fold the edges into a crimp.

Repeat until filling/skins used up (we made 43 of them!)

When you come to serve them, you need to heat a large frying pan with a tbsp vegetable oil. Lay the gyoza flat side down in the pan and cook for 3-5 minutes until the underside is crisp. Turn over and cook for another 3 mins. Remove from the pan and keep warm while you repeat the process with the rest of the gyoza in batches. Return all the gyoza to the pan. Pour in half a glass of water and straight away put a lid on the pan. Steam the gyoza until the water has gone and then serve immedately.

Serve with a dipping sauce – 2 tbsp rice vinegar, 3 tbsp soy sauce and 2-3 drops of sesame oil, mixed together.

After all that, what I needed was a good cocktail – so my mum made me an Earl Grey Martini – which is my new favourite drink!! Thanks, mum!