Thursday, January 24, 2013

A dumpling adventure

I've been doing volunteer English tutoring with new migrants to Australia for about seven years now, and it's definitely a two-way street. My students get to polish up their English, and I get to learn about their lives and cultures. My current student, Yan, recently told me of her prowess making Chinese dumplings ... then offered to show me how it is done! So yesterday we discussed the finer points of dumplings. (Yes, there were some opportunities for vocabulary practice in there.)

This is not a recipe, but I did take notes and photos so want to share the adventure.


The filling included minced pork, soy sauce, salt, pepper, and very
finely chopped celery, leeks, shallots, garlic chives, and ginger


The dough only contained plain flour and water ... Yan made
the process of making dumpling wrappers look easy, but I'm sure it's not!


  Dumplings ready to cook


Dumplings can be steamed, boiled or fried. These were boiled, and served
with a very, very hot fresh chilli sauce. Lucky me ;-)

What a wonderful experience! I'll definitely have to try making them myself, while Yan's lesson is fresh in my mind. They were delicious.

If you're interested in dumplings, I recommend Jasmine's blog My Little Dumplings. It offers a delightful romp through the dumpling traditions of the world, complete with recipes, science, history and maths.

3 comments:

Lesley said...

What a fabulous story of a cross-cultural learning exchange in the kitchen! Thanks for sharing, Karin.

And thanks for that great link to the dumpling blog.

I'm definitely going to keep an eye on your blog as I've seen lots of other things of interest there.

Cheers, Lesley

Karin said...

Thanks so much for stopping by, Lesley! Best wishes ;-) Karin

Digby said...

Yum Yum...What a great way to learn English and dumpling making.
Great work Karin. A great way to teach and to value someone else's culture and skills.
Cheers
Tina