Dumpling Cooking Class

Went to a Chinese dumpling making class yesterday.  I really enjoyed it!  At first, when Xinye mentioned it, I thought, 'Ok, I won't be so completely useless in the kitchen next time we visit his family in China.'  But that was it.  I'm not big into cooking and I hate having to do all the dishes that cooking invariably causes to get dirty.

Xinye and I got to the community building/church ten minutes late and there were a circle of people sitting in a great room, talking.  We introduced ourselves, and soon moved to the giant kitchen.  There were three or four people in charge and they passed out vegetables for us to clean and chop.  We were left to figure out what knives we wanted to use and how finely to chop everything with minimal input.

We prepared the dumplings first, putting all our ingredients into a bowl and then scooping it out into little dough circles.  The instructors demonstrated how to close them prettily and then left us to do the dozens more.  It was a good laugh as people made fun of their dumplings and how some of them would pop back open and others wouldn't stand up and so had to be shaped into a kind of horse shoe.  Luckily, there didn't seem to be any Know-It-Alls in the group, so that hour passed by delightfully.

After that, things kind of degenerated into organized chaos.  I always imagined a cooking class would be very structured and boring.  But there were about thirty people there for the class and about half way through we just wandered from station to station to help where we wanted or walk on by if it didn't strike our fancy.  Every once in a while one of the people in charge would grab you and say, "Cook this!" or "Chop that!"  It was so much fun.  It was exciting and the other students were full of energy and speaking and laughing and it was just a lot of fun!

Finally, we all sat down and ate what we'd made.  Some of it was a little over cooked.  Some of it was a little too salty.  But the majority of the food was really good!  And now I know the general idea of how to cook Chinese food! Go me.