Dumpling Party

Happy New Year Everyone! I hope that your new year has begun well. It certainly has with me. Today I had some friends come to my apartment for a Dumpling Party. So, you are probably thinking, “What is a Dumpling Party?” Well, it is not a Chinese thing, and it is certainly not a Western thing. It is the “brain child” of me and my Chinese teacher (Lily).

It started a few weeks ago. I met my Chinese teacher at Starbuck’s for Chinese class. After she taught me, we started talking about the differences between Chinese food and the food you would find in the States. Then I had an idea. What if we combined them somehow? Could it work? Lily and I started talking about it, and we came up with a few ideas. We decided to try to make Chinese dumplings with a Western twist.


So, we planned out a night to make dumplings and have some friends come over to try them out – guinea pigs. So, I invited Gill, Dorty, and Ted (Americans) and Katherine and Bay (both Chinese).
We wanted to make sure to get the opinions of both Chinese and Western people.

Lily and Bay came over early and started making Chinese Mushroom Dumplings. I made several fillings of my own too. Among them were Mexican Style, BBQ Bacon Cheddar, and Chicken Parmesan. I gave the fillings to Lily and Bay and they folded them into dumplings. I tried to fold one dumpling and it was a disaster. Lily told me to get away from them. It is no doubt, an acquired skill to make them.

Gill, Dorty, and Ted came over as they were folding the last dumplings. We started cooking them and bringing them out one at a time for everyone to try. The Mexican Style and the BBQ Bacon Cheddar Dumplings were a huge success. Everyone seemed to love them. The Chicken Parmesan wasn’t as good.

It was a risk. There was tremendous potential for disaster, but fortunately it was largely a success. If anything, it was great to hang out with some amazing people and share something that has probably never been attempted before. I’m thinking about making it an annual thing. It was an interesting way to bring in the New Year.

"At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable."
-Henry David Thoreau

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