Well our second day off wasn't as challenging as our first. Not that
our first was too bad, we just had more time with English speakers this
day of rest. We started our morning bright and early- we were to
report to the kitchen at 8am. While this was better than the 6:30 taxi
we had to take the last time, we were not all that excited about the
early morn. We arrived at the kitchen for our dumpling making lesson.
It was all a blur after that. We met the cook- who spoke no English-
and her assistant, who also spoke no English- but cooking is really an
international language isn't it? The dough was already prepared, so I
guess we weren't learning about that part, and we dutifully
followed the cooks into the larger kitchen area, carefully dodging the
fly papers dotted with black specimens (yet another reason to support
the fact that I haven't eaten in the cafeteria since the first week-
Amy and her mom are much more diligent about at least checking to see
what's for dinner/lunch). The kitchen in itself was intriguing-
there were multiple woks that were the largest ones I had ever seen-
and many different spots to cook with them- lots of burner areas.
The fans were running, but it was really warm in the kitchen. We lined
up beside a long silver table and waited for our instructions or in
this case for the motions of what we would be doing. She kneaded
the dough, and rolled them into long tubes, and then cut about 1 inch
pieces off the roll. These were to be flattened out in circular shapes
and then she'd put the filling on top of them. The filling was also
pre-made, so we didn't learn about that either. There was pork
and some green onions and a bunch of other things in there too. We
started rolling the small ones, some were too thin, some too thick, but
whatever- we're foreigners and she was throwing the dough at us so
damn fast that we didn't know what to do with ourselves. Then she'd
apply the pork mix to the center of the flat round dough pieces-
and we were to pinch them together- but in a way that was decorative.
Interesting- we didn't do much more than the slave work to assemble
these dumplings- and after we got through the first chunk of dough, we
thought- ok, that was fun. And then she started cutting the second
long tube of dough. At any rate, we assembled (poorly) multitudes of
dumplings, thinking we were making lunch for the next day, and then
watched as they put them in the gargantu-wok with boiling hot water.
They cooked for about 10 minutes, and then they were put into another
bowl, that had boiling water and some green onions and herbs already
simmering in it. We weren't sure what was happening next- which is
part for the course in China, but we washed our hands and followed the
cooks to the eating area. The Vice-director of the summer program and
Emily served us each some dumplings in the onion broth and we started
eating. We learned later that the Vice-director and Emily accompanied
us on the entire day because the Director told them to protect us
while we were out. Hmmm. Anyhow, the dumplings were fantastic, we
each got a little plastic to-go container with more in them for later,
and we were cleaned up and out of the kitchen by 9:00.
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