Nostalgia

One of the great things about moving is finding little bits of nostalgia.

My Little Dumplings

After having Chinese Dim Sum dumplings in Chicago's China town in January, I have been searching everywhere for them. Wei Wei Seafood Palace in Grand Rapids is the only place I've found that comes close and they only have seafood options. I decided to try and make them myself. I'd read that they are very difficult to make, but I figured I could handle it. Wrong! The dough is made with wheat starch and potato starch and is very sticky. When I added more dry ingredients it just dried the dough out and overall it was a very tedious process of rolling out the finicky dough and stuffing the dumplings with chopped up shrimp, pork and veggies. As I was working, I said I would never make them again. But, when I ate them, they tasted just like I remembered. I think I'll play around with different dough recipes.

After forming the dumplings, I put them in a vegetable steamer lined with cabbage, since I didn't have a bamboo steamer.


I've found a great book called A World of Dumplings and I hope to try out some of their recipes.

Purple Beans??

I've grown green beans before and I don't remember the flowers being purple. They are quite pretty, but I hope the beans aren't purple.



I've never grown cabbage. I hope they are doing okay. They are just really leafy right now and I hope they develop nice cabbage heads and that I'll know when to harvest them.



While Carmina and the girls were here, we picked cherries. Yum, yum! I don't think we were supposed to CLIMB the trees, but I'll bet Carmina found some good ones up there.



We had to pick carefully because many of the cherries were moldy because of heavy rains we had the week before. A day later I went to a different farm with beautiful cherries. Not a moldy one in sight. I guess I know where we'll go next year.

Old Fashioned Things

You know how expensive those photo booths are these days? Well, we found one for $1 at The Children's Museum in Chicago. My Mom came up with the dollar and my nieces and I goofed around for the photos. Fun!