From Grits to Chopsticks

Over the past year, we’ve enjoyed spending time with a young couple who operate a small tutoring school in our apartment building.  This week, they invited us over to make “shuijiao,” traditional Chinese dumplings.  As with many kinds of Chinese food, there are numerous steps which need expert guidance.

Preparing the fillings requires a lot of chopping and mixing of ingredients.  Most of our dumplings were filled with a mixture of ground pork, eggs, chives, garlic, ginger, salt, and soy sauce:

– stirred with chopsticks, of course:We also prepared shrimp for a shrimp + pork filling: Our friend kneaded the dough for about 20 minutes, getting it just right to form the dumpling shells:

You may have noticed that almost everything is cut with the same cleaver, saving a lot on dishwashing.  We were then trained to roll and cut the dumplings to the ideal size and shape:The dumplings are filled and the edges pinched to retain the contents:Dumplings are usually made by the entire family during Spring Festival, providing a nice time of family fellowship:

Once the dumplings are ready, they are dropped into a pot of boiling water:When some of them start to float, quench the boiling with some cold water:

After three cycles of boiling and cooling, it’s time to sit down and enjoy a good meal together.  And since it took two and a half hours to get to this point, everyone is hungry enough to eat them all!Oh yeah, one more thing – it is traditional to drink the dumpling broth afterwards to aid in digestion (fortunately, he didn’t say aid indigestion!):