Howdy folks! This has probably been the longest gap in posts in the history of blogs – well, at least this blog. It’s been almost a year since I’ve posted anything and for all you loyal readers (I know there are still a few – and I mean literally, three, “Hi Mom, Sis and Wife!” #strongwomen) I apologize. Life seems to have taken over in the last year. Shef and I bought a house! I got back in the TV game and produced a couple episodes of this “crazy science” show. Also, Shef has again been eating for two. So, it’s been a busy past year. But all along, Matt – who’s also had a really busy year – and I have been working on our dumplings recipes and are getting closer to making our dumpling dreams into dumpling reality. Since Episode 1 (you can watch below), we got our pork and chive dumplings down to a science, including the the grind. We also created two other fillings: chicken/lemon grass and kale/caramelized onions (because we care about vegetarians too!). We tested out our three types of dumplings when we catered a party of 120 people for a friend. The dumplings were a hit. But we were not satisfied to rest on our laurels. You see, we used mostly store bought skins which are pretty easy to work with and obviously very consistent. But in our experiences, the best dumplings we’d ever had were ones with homemade skin – just flour and water. That’s what we wanted our dumplings to be: the best that people had ever eaten. We needed to make our own skins. So, for our first pop up held a few weeks ago at school where Matt teaches, we gave ourselves the “small” task of making our own dumpling skins. We thought we simplified the process by employing pasta machines and biscuit cutters, but even still, making skins added a whole level of complexity and time to the dumpling equation which almost killed us. Thankfully, we had great family and friends who generously volunteered their positive attidudes and fingers to help us fold and we got it done. It was a lot of work but we learned a whole hell of a lot too. Check out the video below.
Here’s my favorite bit of feedback from our inaugural pop up.
