Try these ideas for pork-free gyoza

Q When I was growing up, my mother made gyoza, the pork- and cabbage-filled Japanese dumplings. My wife is a vegetarian so I'd like to find something to replace the pork, yet keep the rich spicy flavor. Your ideas?

A For the uninitiated, gyoza (Japanese pot stickers) are little turnovers of noodle dough (won-ton wrappers do well here) filled with a blend of ground pork, cooked cabbage, garlic chives, sesame oil, soy sauce and ginger. Lots of variations exist, but the pork and cabbage are pretty much standard.

Once the dumplings are sealed, you can freeze them. You can cook them by pan-browning (hence the name "pot stickers"), deep-frying or steaming.

The dipping sauce usually served with gyoza is a blend of Japanese soy sauce (6 tablespoons), vinegar (2 tablespoons) and hot chile oil (2 teaspoons). This is not bad as a dipping sauce for almost anything.

You could do a couple of things that are done in Japan. First, instead of the pork, sauté chopped-up shiitake mushrooms. They stand in well for meat.

You could just use cabbage, browning it very well instead of boiling. Then cook into it vinegar, soy, garlic and ginger. Browned cabbage has surprising depth. Other substitutes for the ground pork would be firm tofu, ground edamame beans or roasted sweet potatoes.

Q A really curious corn dish has us wanting to duplicate it at home. A restaurant did what it called "Moroccan Corn on the Cob," with chunks of hot corn that you rolled in a green spicy sauce. Sharing recipes was not the restaurant's thing, but we could taste fresh coriander. Can you figure this out for us?

A I'll bet a dozen ears of Silver Queen that the restaurant served a chermoula, which is a marinade/sauce used all along the coast of North Africa from Tunisia to Morocco. I have to chuckle at the idea of "Moroccan" corn on the cob, since sweet corn is all but unknown in that territory. But in the spirit of putting two good things together, rolling a hot ear in this mix would be pretty tasty and it neatly sidesteps the saturated-fat quandary of whether or not to use butter.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper hosts "The Splendid Table," on Minnesota Public Radio; splendidtable.org. Send questions to table@mpr.org.