2009 Spring Festival: Homemade Dumplings and Moxibustion

Yesterday was Chinese New Year's Eve or the night before Spring Festival, which is the cultural equivalent to Christmas in America. My wonderful neighbors Jim and Yanzi invited me, Meizi (a friend I've mentioned before in this blog), and Bob, a colleague of ours, over for a night of eating delicious homemade Chinese food and cooking dumplings. Yanzi, with Jim's help, spent the afternoon cooking our feast while Meizi and I ate sunflower seeds and chatted in the living room. Bob stopped by a little before the meal began, bearing a huge box of fruit, a traditional gift given here on holidays.

Here is a picture of Meizi posing next to our table before we sit down to eat.


After we devoured our meal, we chatted for awhile, and then early in the evening Yanzi and Meizi set to preparing the dumplings FROM SCRATCH, which involves lots of chopping, mixing, kneading, and boiling.

Here is a picture of Yanzi and Meizi working on mincing the celery, cabbage, and ginger, which they will add to ground pork and salt to make the dumpling fillings.


After the chopping comes the making of the dumpling casings. Yanzi kneads the dough, pulls it into strips, and then separates the strips into balls, which she then rolls into small circles.


Once the casings are made, we use chopsticks to place a small portion of the celery pork or cabbage pork filling onto each piece of dough. Here Yanzi does this with ease.


And then the casings are pinched shut to seal in all the savory ingredients.


Jim contributes by chopping the garlic for the dipping sauce.


As a 外国人 wai guo ren (foreigner), I feel pretty lucky to get a chance to try my hand at making dumplings. Meizi and Yanzi lend their expertise, telling me that my dumplings look good. I know they are just being nice, but I don't care because I am having such a blast!





The last step: boiling. The dumplings are brought to a boil, then the water is drained and new water is added. This happens three times before the dumplings are fully cooked and ready to be eaten.


And at last we can enjoy!



After feasting on dumplings, we settled down to watch various Spring Festival galas on TV...and do some moxibustion. This TCM technique is supposed to help with circulation and the flow of energy in the body. Yanzi, who studied TCM, insisted that it feels good and is healthy for you, but anything that involves a large flaming wick and big red welts can't be THAT relaxing. I decided to pass...for now.

Simple in Some Ways

Once you get past being able to distinguish the different tones and aside from having to learn thousands of characters, Mandarin is really not that difficult of a language. In many ways it is incredibly practical and straightforward.

For example, the character for day 日(ri) rose out of a drawing of the sun coming up over the horizon. Mountain 山 (shan) also looks like a crude sketch of a peak. And since no new characters can be created, new words must be formed from existing characters. Like when computers were invented, the characters for electronic and brain were combined to name this more recent technology.

And one of my favorite terms is what the Chinese call "everybody." In English, this is such a generic label, showing no relationship, but in Chinese, everybody is said as 大家 or in the Romanization of characters, as "da jia." By themselves, da means big and jia means family. So, "everybody" is a "big family." Isn't that cool? I love the connotation this has. What a great way to think of the populace, not as a mass of people, but as family.

Thoughts

I find my thoughts and feelings fluctuating rapidly. Here are some of the things that have gone through my head in the past hour:

I am gleeful that my computer is working again! I can't believe how after everything else fails slapping something on your palm fixes it.

I should go for a run.

I should go to my office and complete lesson plans.

The Chinese will cook and eat anything...and somehow make it taste good.

I miss cheese.

Does my sweat really smell like sour milk since I eat dairy products?

Everyone is pregnant.

I have been cold for 77 hours straight.

I want to stay in bed all day.

I want to see ALL of China.

I didn't know someone could pleasure an ear. Ear cleaning is a very interesting business.

I can't believe rats are kept at bay in the middle of the night by hearing bad Chinese war TV shows.

I am so glad I have a rat problem rather than a spider problem. That I could not live with.

I am so thankful for my kind neighbors.

Yong qi has expensive massages. What a let down.

Xylitol is good for my teeth. So is tea.