My Good Friday Full of Wontons!

So growing up, I remember a lot of time spent watching my mom cooking. It was some of my fonder memories of my childhood, and definitely picked up a lot of tips and tricks on the way. One of the more fun food ventures was her making wontons. The last time I remember this happening was at least over 2 years ago, so a natural craving developed inside of me.
As a "killing 2 birds with 1 stone" tactic, I decided to suggest wrapping wontons sometime over the Easter weekend since we had free time anyway, and finally killing the long time craving. I find great pleasure in hands on ventures and producing something from scratch, so I was very excited when she agreed.... but only to put together the mixture, and I would do the wrapping. I didn't really care, it was worth it and I always thought it was fun anyway =)

So for the mixture (filling), she soaked dried up mushrooms over night. Snipped off the stems (they get rubbery) and cut them up into slices. While she did that and chopped them up into bitty pieces, I worked on the shrimp...

Raw shrimp, shelled and deveined

My mom keeps the shrimp shells and boils them up for the broth later (waste not want not). I patted down the shrimp after the cleaning and snip them into 3 pieces.

Chopping up the ground pork and mushroom together

"The meat mixtureeee!" Ground pork, mushroom, pepper, garlic power, salt

With everything mixed in

Mix in shrimp, sesame oil, and 2 egg whites.

The wrappers we used

So onwards to the fun part!

Here's how my mom taught me to wrap wontons!

Hold the wrapper in a diamond shape with point facing you.

Scoop in about a teaspoon amount of filling and 1 piece of shrimp.

Fold up the bottom point upwards most way. Leaving about a cm point to point at the top.

Turn up the bottom. Not too tightly but enough to keep it in place. Gently squeeze both sides of wrapper to move filling towards the center. Again make sure not to squeeze too hard, wrapper breakage isn't a pretty site...

Add a dab of water onto the right point of the wrapper.

Put your left pointer finger to where the mixture is in the middle, and wrap both arms of the wrapper towards the center. Overlap the right over left. Make sure to give the wrapper and extra squeeze where it overlaps to make sure the water has "glued" them together

And you have made your own wonton!

Look at all them!

So the finally result was about 4 plates. I don't know how many we made at the end. Yes, being my mother, she can't stand sitting back and watching, she had to help put them together claiming: "I would never finish before dinner time"... crazy moms =p you just wanted in on the action!

And the FINAL RESULTTTTT:

Drummmm Roolllllll:

Finishedd!

Ta-daaa! Yummers!