Making dumplings

I feel like every foreigner who lives in China eventually has this experience - making 饺子 jiaozi (dumplings) with your local friends.


You may remember Asian Kate.  She's was our real estate agent, and is currently our neighbor.  She works ALL the time.  The realty office that she works at is right beside the gate of our complex.  She and her husband run the business, so they are literally there 24/7.  Twenty four hours a week, 7 weeks a year.


Actually they're there every day (Monday through Sunday) from 9:00am to 9:00pm.  When her husband's around, Asian Kate works all day long and has no time to hang out.  BUT when her husband goes to Hong Kong (his hometown) to visit his mother, Kate is free to hang out.


For months she has been telling me, "When my husband goes to Hong Kong, we can make dumplings together." "When my husband is gone, we can go shopping!"  But I was never really sure when her husband actually went on these trips.  Then about three weeks ago she knocked on my door to say, "He's going to Hong Kong November 1-5th!"


So Wednesday, Kate and I went to the market to buy fillings for dumplings, then brought them back to my house to stuff the dumplings, steam them and boil them.  It was a lot of fun to finally get some time to hang out with her, and super fun to finally learn how to make dumplings.  Kate kept saying, "I think making jiaozi is fun!"  Her mother apparently is a great jiaozi maker, and it is her family tradition (actually a lot of Chinese families' tradition) to make jiaozi together and eat them at Chinese new year.  Maybe next blog I'll write about this tradition and what I learned about the "legend" of jiaozi from my chinese teacher.


There is a specific way to make jiaozi look pretty when you are closing up the dumplings, and it took practice for me to get them done well, but by the end, Kate told me I could open up an "Jiaozi Made by an American Shop."

steamed jiaozi

making the fillings

teaching me the proper way to wrap them