My earliest memory of cooking is my grandmother showing me how to make chicken gravy on the big combustion stove in her kitchen.

There is also another dish that stays in my mind from those days, from Nana Hinki, my uncle’s mother.

Nana Hinki’s family came to Australia from Russia in the 1950s and 40 years on I can still conjure up the smells that always filled her kitchen, where she would be making these incredibly moreish dumplings.

Ingredients

Serves 4

350g plain flour

1 egg

140ml milk or water

Salt

250g pork fillet

2 small onions, minced

1 clove garlic

5 drops of olive oil

Handful of chopped parsley

Soured cream and chopped dill

Method

1 Put the flour into a bowl. Bring the milk or water to the boil in a pan, then add the egg and a pinch of salt and mix together. Add to the flour and mix into a dough. Set aside to rest for about 40 minutes.

2 Chop the pork and the onions very, very finely until they are almost a paste. With the back of a large knife crush and scrape the garlic with half a teaspoonful of salt until this too, is like a paste. Transfer the pork, onions and garlic to a bowl, with the olive oil and parsley and beat it until you have as fine a paste as possible.

3 Roll out the dough until it is about 1.5-2mm thick. Cut out circles of 6cm across. Spoon a little ball of pork paste on to the centre of each, lift the edges and twist to form little sealed dumplings.

4 Drop carefully into a pan of slightly salted boiling water, bring back to the boil and cook for about 7-10 minutes. When they rise to the top, lift out and toss with soured cream and chopped dill.

How to enter the competition

Do you have your own secret recipe? A family favourite passed on through generations or a dish you learnt from your best friend? If you’d like to share it then send it to us and we’ll consider it for publication. If it arrives before 5pm on May 27, it will automatically be entered for our Reader’s Recipe Exchange competition. Gordon Ramsay will select his five favourites and each winner will receive Waitrose vouchers worth £150 (also redeemable at John Lewis).

Send your favourite family recipes to recipeexchange@thetimes.co.uk or post them online by clicking here.

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