Dumplings aka. jiaozi aka. 饺子

My TA, Echo, left DD Dragon last week to go on maternity leave which is very sad for me because I really liked working and hanging out with her. However there is a bright side (other than the fact she is going to be a Mom), she has more time to cook and teach us westerners!! She invited us over for a dumpling party and we had a blast! She lives 20-30 min away from us so it was a long bus ride through a diffrent part of Cangzhou than we had ever been to. It was just Edwina, Abigael and myself that went over and we spent 4 hours laughing and learning to make dumplings with Echo & her husband.

Making dumplings is easy, all you need is:

• flour, salt and water to make the dough casing 

To make the yummy middle we had:

• cabbage, garlic, leeks, chives, ginger all minced up really fine 
• minced pork mixed with salt, water, pepper, chicken bullion, soy sauce, a type of oil the Chinese call 'smelly oil' and peanut oil. 
• you mix it all together then wrap the mix up in the dough casings. 
• boil 3 times: boil in water till they float, strain dumpling, add clean water then re-boil, then do it all again a 3rd time. 
• now comes the most important steps: pour soy sauce or vinegar into a bowl for dipping and enjoy the yummy steaming dumplings!! 

Our dumplings were, according to Echo, "a great success"!! And boy were they yummy, the best we've had so far!




Here is a video of Echo rolling out the casings.  She's talking to her husband, tell him to teach us how to fill and fold the dumplings.  She rolled probably around 100 dumplings, maybe more.