Sunday night, Shannan and I went over to my parents' apartment to participate in a traditional Chinese expeience...dumpling making. I'm not sure I've actually ever done this, but apparently people all over China do this on New Year's Eve when members of the family return home for New Year's celebrations.

There are a few stations involved in the process: the dough maker/chopper, the dough flattener, the skin former, the filling stuffer, and the dumpling pincher. I'm sure there's some official terminology for the actual people in those positions and that some of these roles can be combined, but for the five of us (Aunt Bonnie was there too), that's how the roles were split and that's what I'm calling the process. The easiest job fell to me most of the night - filling the dumplings (if you know how to use chopsticks, you can do this job).

It took us a little while, but we made something like 200 dumplings - pork and shrimp with Chinese leek and pork and shrimp with Chinese cabbage. The best part about the labor intensive process of making dumplings has to be the family bonding and of course the dumpling eating afterwards.

Posted by tien mao in Food/Drink, Friends/Family, Photos at 5:13 PM