Dumping time!

Dumplings are part of the Chinese new year ritual. In my part of the country, people make them on New Year's Eve and then have them for dinner, for midnight snack if they stay up until the New Year comes, also for part of the New Year's Day's meal as well.

Traditionally dumpling making is a family event, considering how much efforts one has to put into cutting all the ingredients into small pieces, making a dough and rolling a tiny portion of it into many many nicely-rounded wrapper and last, put fillings into each wrapper and closely them up tightly...

Ideally they also have to look nice, like mine shown in picture ;) . Not sure why people like this shape rather than many other possibilities, but one hypothesis was they look like the shape of Ancient Chinese money.

One game my family like to play is a candy used as filling for one dumpling. Whoever has that one out of the hundreds of dumplings will have a more healthy and happy new year.

I totally forgot that game tonight as I was trying to finish up making dumplings by midnight. No, not that late, but we didn't have dinner until 9pm I think. New Years is still four days away, but I felt as if we had a taste of it already--it was delicious!