never such thing as a quiet weekend!

I was home again this weekend, after having been away on holidays and/or away teaching for the past three weekends. It was lovely to be home with my family again! However, that didn’t make it any less busy.

On Saturday, The Reader and I went off to our pattern drafting course again, this week finishing off making our way through the many skirt patterns. We moved back onto tops, and I struggled to remember how to draft one, including all *my* adjustments to suit my body shape. I was heard to moan at one stage “oh, why can’t I just be the same as the pattern turns out?” I am sure that in time I will get used to making all my personal adjustments, but at this stage I am still struggling to just remember how to do the base pattern itself! Practice, practice, practice!

Yesterday, Rainbow Girl went to a birthday party at her old gym with some of her old gym friends. Because the mum of the birthday girl is one of my good friends, I stayed to stickybeak at the party, give her a bit of a hand with corralling the children during the party food section, and to have a chat to some of the other mums, many of whom I haven’t seen in ages! It was lovely to be back there again.

Last night I decided to make dumplings for dinner. Previously I have made them with store-bought wrappers, but my sister recently passed on a recipe which included the dough. The dough was so easy! I chucked two cups of plain flour and a cup of boiling water into the Kenwood Mixmaster, and gave it all a whizz with the dough hook for about 10-15 mins. I did have to stop it early in the piece to help incorporate all the still-dry ingredients, but apart from that, the dough hook did it all for me, creating lovely silky smooth dough.

You then have to roll it into 2cm thick “snakes”, and chop them into pieces about 1cm long. Each of these little blobs of dough gets coated in cornflour and then rolled out flat to about 8cm diameter. This was quite time consuming, and although my wrappers didn’t turn out very round, they worked really well. I could have easily gotten more than 50 out of the dough quantity, if only I’d had enough filling to put in them! I ran out around the 40 dumpling point!

I made up some savoury filling out of what we had in the fridge and pantry, then we steamed them in a bamboo basket. The dough worked far better than the store bought stuff – much less likely to break open, and much less likely to stick to the neighbouring dumplings (and had no extra, unnecessary ingredients such as colouring or preservatives!). I will certainly be making them again, when I have a spare 1.5 to 2 hours… 😉