Gioza Day

The sun broke through for approximately 90 seconds yesterday afternoon after disappearing from the sky sometime late Wednesday evening.  The temperature is now hovering around the low forties without promise of much better today.  We are promised that later today it will make an appearance, but we are long sceptics of the promise of meteorologist in North Florida.  The grey is a reminder of many of the days in Tokyo when the hoped for snow would hang around Mt. Fuji and swing to the north of us.  So, until the promise of blue skies return, I have concluded that this day at our house is Gioza Day.

I have spent the last hour in the kitchen slinging around flour as I combined boiling water, salt, oil, and flour  to form the dough for these dumplings.  While the dough rested, I mixed together sausage; soy sauce; and grated garlic, onion, and cabbage for the filling.

While I rolled out the little circles, my memories of our years in Japan a half century ago rolled through my memories.  I discovered gioza in a little Japanese restaurant a quarter of a mile from the gate the children from Green Park Housing Area tromped through each morning headed to the elementary school.  Several factories surrounded the complex and when we wives ventured out to eat, we usually shared the small space with numerous factory workers slurping bowls of noodles who took great delight in watching the “new” gygenes[B1]  (foreigners) struggle with the chopsIticks or end up eating with the serving scoop.  Their amusement led to my becoming proficient with chopsticks quickly.  In the evening when we would be accompanied by our husbands, we would usually be the only ones in the place, but one of the staff would load the back of his bicycle with stacked up containers of takeout and pedal off into the maze of apartment buildings close to the factories to deliver them.

My husband had discovered gioza in Korea and the first evening we both went to the little restaurant, he pointed to the plastic model in the window and we were served my first, hot from the wok dumplings.

The cook who prepared them was probably less than ten feet away from our table, and he basically cooked one thing after another.  We could see him through the slit in a curtain in a kitchen much smaller than most of us had in our apartments.

Anyway, while we waited for our food, the smell of garlic, soy, and other delightful aromas drifted out to us.

Most of you have eaten these little pie shaped dumplings, but most of you know them as pot stickers, available in our frozen food freezers at the supermarket.  But today we are in the middle of a pandemic and I do not want put on my mask, dress, and  travel eight miles in the grey morning to buy them.  So, I have them ready to cook at noon.

We will think of Rob and Traci while we eat them.  They accompanied us on our return to Japan a year and a half ago when we reserved an evening after our tour of Nikko, a lovely mountain village, to stop at the train station in Utsonomiya for their famous gioza.  Rob and his dad Klep managed to eat about thirty each, but Traci and I opted for a few less.

Our last six months in Japan were spent at Tachikawa Air Force Base where I was privileged to take Chinese cooking lessons from Mrs. Kunsan who owned a Chinese restaurant in Nisi-Tachikawa near the west gate of the base which served the housing area where we lived in a delightful little house with an enclosed garden.  She would teach the lessons in the morning to a few American women at a time.  I was delighted when she taught us how to prepare Chiatzu which was. by another name, Gioza, potstickers, or whatever you might want to call them.

So, grey skies though there may be, today I celebrate the dumpling!  Klep will be thankful that nostalgia sent me to the cookbook.  Happy Gioza Day!

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