大连: Jiaozi Making!

Dinner on Sunday evening was a sumptuous feast of 饺子 (jiǎozi), more commonly known in the United States as dumplings. My friend's mother was patient enough to teach me how to shape the very famous little dumplings and seal them for steaming. She prepared the filling, of course, as I am not yet ready to advance to that stage of jiaozi preparation. The filling was a mix of chopped-up pork and some unidentified greens, which you can see in the bowl below (ignore the odd face):

The next step of jiaozi-making involves preparing the small doughy pancakes that will eventually become the pouches for the pork filling. If you look at the cutting board, you can see the small sections of dough waiting to be rolled out into flat pancakes:

And now... for my attempts at making the little shapes you see on the round tray above:

Then, after some steaming and waiting, we see the final result in the bowls at the far edges of the table:

Yes, I am now a jiaozi-wrapping pro... kind of. I can say, though, that my jiaozi were particularly good (as were all the other jiaozi in the bowls). While consuming my jiaozi, I learned that jiaozi actually has a lot of fortuitous meaning in Chinese culture. They're eaten specifically on the Chinese New Year, known as the Spring Festival, as part of the celebration of a fortuitous year. So my host parents explained to me, eating jiaozi together had particularly good meaning. I was so thankful for their willingness to offer me the experience of making traditional jiaozi with such a warm and open family. Someday, maybe, I'll learn how to make my own jiaozi and serve it up to my family. We'll see what they think about that.

P.S. See the cake in the middle? It will be my friend's birthday in a few weeks, but she'll be at college, so her parents wanted to celebrate. They literally just put the cake on the table, told her to cut it, and we started eating it along with dinner. No song or anything. For all the ceremony surrounding other aspects of Chinese life, it seems that birthdays do not get the same spotlight treatment they get in the States. Bad when you're young, good when you're old.