Menu Description: "Served with a ginger chili pepper soy sauce. Steamed or pan-fried."

Shrimp Dumplings from P. F. Chang's are scrumptious mounds of shrimp and other yummy ingredients wrapped in wonton wrappers and steamed. You can also order them pan-fried, which makes the bottom of each little package a nice crispy brown. The dumplings are served with a soy-based dipping sauce that can be cloned by combining six ingredients in a saucepan. Recreating that part was easy. But those dumplings - oh, man! I must have gone through a couple boatloads of shrimp trying to figure out the best way to get my filling to hold together like the real thing. I tried adding egg and cornstarch and potato starch and flour to pureed cooked shrimp, but all I got was a shrimp mush that made the dumplings starchy and less flavorful than the real deal. It was only when I remembered hearing about how years ago shrimp molds were created into which pureed raw shrimp was poured and then cooked, creating uniform shrimp shapes that still had the taste and texture of unprocessed shrimp. No binders necessary. So get out your food processor and prepare yourself for the not-so-pretty sight of pulverized raw shrimp. At least you don't have to worry about the size of the shrimp you buy for this recipe, since you're going to mash up the little dudes anyway.