Busy

We've been so busy lately. It seems that things haven't slowed down since Thanksgiving. There always seems to be something or other going on.

There was a daddy-daughter activity this past weekend. The theme was for a hoe-down. Emily was excited and had been looking forward to it all week.

She gets dad to herself this one last year at these things as Caitlyn will be going next time too. They didn't get to stay for all the activities though since dinner started late and apparently there was a very long line at the chuck wagon.

Christian and I had to give talks at church the next morning and Christian wasn't quite done with his by the time they had to go.

Caitlyn and I had dinner and I let Caitlyn choose what she wanted to do together.  She chose to play Wii, so that's what we ended up doing most of the time that they were gone.

After church, we had a bunch of friends over for lunch. Chinese New Year is celebrated for 15 days normally. It ends with the lantern festival. We decided to try our hand at making our traditional New Year's dumplings. We have been working on parts of it with my mom for many years now, but we have never attempted to do it all on our own before. The hardest part was the filling, as my mother usually prepares that by herself prior to us arriving. And I guess when I lived at home still, I was just a stupid kid who never paid that much attention to how it is exactly made. Most Chinese home cooks don't really have set recipes on how to cook things. They just throw stuff together and it tastes fabulous so it has always been difficult for me to learn how to replicate things my parents made.

I wrote down (more or less) what ingredients are in the dumpling filling, but had to guess on the proportions quite a bit.

We thought we would invite a bunch of people over to taste our dumplings and teach them a little of how to make them. The dumplings we make are very traditional in the area of China that my parent's grew up in but is not really widely had elsewhere, so it is apparently quite unique. I have not met anyone else who make them.

It was a bit chaotic at first as Caitlyn and I came home from church an hour later than everyone else because we had a Baptismal Preview meeting after church. We also ended up having a lot more people over than we had expected, but everything turned out great in the end. The dumplings tasted pretty good (although the flavor was not exactly like my mother's). One of the other girls brought some other traditional New Year's food for us to try as well. She had never made it on her own either so it was pretty exciting.

I also made taro cake the day before so that we can slice them and fry them up so that we can get something to eat while we make the dumplings. I have never made them before either so that was new for me as well. It turned out pretty good but, again, they did not quite taste like my mother's! She actually bought some of the hard to get supplies for me and we picked them up the week before on our way to another party. I have not yet had a chance to tell her how everything turned out.

Everyone seemed to like the dumplings as there was not one left at the end of the afternoon. And everyone seemed to have a great time so I guess it was a success.

We think that it is very important to keep these traditions and to pass them down through the generations. Hopefully, we will be able to instill a love for it to our own girls and that they will one day learn to do it with their families on their own as well.