Dumpling Love

I was in a Chinese restaurant a couple of weeks ago, and I looked at the list of appetizers and sighed. For $5.95 + tax, I could get a plate of five dumplings. Five? That's more than $1.19 a dumpling! There was a time, before my trip to China, when I might have ordered those dumplings. I might have seen that price as reasonable. But now, I look at the menu and I think about the student cafeteria at XISU, about how a carry out bag of twenty dumplings cost me about $1.75, and I just can't do it.

So I'm thinking of making my own dumplings. They don't seem that hard: some ground pork, some veggies, some doughy stuff to wrap it all up in. Sounds easy enough. I remember having lunch in China with a student. She ordered for us dumplings filled with broth--the exploding water balloon of the dumpling world. They were delicious, and she told me they were simple to make. She talked me through a recipe that I don't remember now, but I wish I'd paid attention. I emailed one of the Chinese students who writes to me regularly a few weeks ago to see if she could send me an authentic recipe, and last week, there it was in my email inbox. Her email English is nowhere near as sharp as the careful English she used in my class, though, so the recipe is a bit difficult to follow. I'm going to try making them, though. I'm just too cheap to pay restaurant prices for a teeny plate of dumplings when I know I can get them so much cheaper. I realize that the cheap dumplings are steaming half a world away, but come on!



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