New Year’s Dumplings

新年快乐! Happy Chinese New Year! I expect great things for the year of the rat. As the first in the cycle of twelve animal signs, 2008 is a time for renewal and change. It is an extremely auspicious year to get married, so it seems that Alex and I are guaranteed to live happily ever after. And, I cannot help but hope that some of this positive transformation will lead to a favorable outcome in the upcoming election, although on this front, it might be more realistic to expect the status quo from the year of rats.

Jiaozi, or dumplings, are the traditional dish of Chinese New Year’s. Families spend the day at home together — the China Central Television’s New Year’s Gala playing loudly in the background — and make hundreds of dumplings to be eaten at midnight. Grandparents criticize the younger generation’s stuffing techniques and reminisce about the old days, when they couldn’t afford meat in their dumplings. It is a time for family bonding and tradition, the Christmas of the Chinese calendar.

Did I mention that 2008 is also supposed to be a year of turmoil? It all has to do with a conflict between water and earth — the specifics are a bit too convoluted for me to explain. What I do know is that the heavens are clearly to blame for my debacle of a New Year’s jiaozi making party. The problems started when I decided to make the dumpling wrappers myself, but didn’t put nearly enough flour into the dough. So, at 8:00, when I was ready to roll them out, the dough was still sticky and springy. I quickly added in more flour, and after much fretting, ended up with a workable dough.

The next crisis was the realization that I really didn’t know how to roll out jiaozi wrappers. I always assumed that this was the sort of instinctual skill that I had appropriated after spending so much time in China. One polite guest suggested that the problem might have been that I was using a rolling pin with handles, instead of the traditional Chinese bench pin. After much experimentation, I finally settled on rolling the dough into a thin sheet, and then cutting out circles with my cookie cutter, a technique that would keep my imagined Chinese grandparents complaining for an entire year.

The dough did come together in the end. Unfortunately, so did the jiaozi, which fused together into one massive dumpling after sitting on a plate for too long. By the time we salvaged what we could, it was much closer to the traditional midnight dinner time than we had originally planned. We were so hungry that we didn’t care about the condition of the jiaozi, which really weren’t that bad. More importantly, the wine was plentiful and the company sublime. My jiaozi making skills definitely need a lot of work, but all in all it was a great way to bring in the new year.