Dim Sum, anyone?

Last night, Lydia and I undertook the Great Dumpling Experiment. also known as, "let's see if this new plastic gadget works!"

So Lydia put together pork dumpling filling according to her FACS recipe from last year before I came home from work, and then when I arrived, we began.

Lo and behold, to my astonishment, it worked like a charm! We were a veritable dumpling factory, churning out nearly 50 picture perfect dumplings in less than 20 minutes, with much less mess, fuss and sticky fingers than if we had folded them by hand. The key to success was using circular dumpling wrappers, and painting the entire inner surface with a cornstarch-water paste before folding them in half and pressing. (That, and not trying to cram too much of the meat filling into each dumpling!)

I'm not very good at this whole picture publishing thing yet (Blogger keeps screwing up my artistic arrangement of the photos!), so you'll have to figure out the chronology yourself...

Glad to hear that you've managed to re-arrange your schedule to drop the Computer Science class and add the horticulture class - sounds like a more worthwhile course anyway. I think you could just as easily have purchased a copy of "Office 2007 for Dummies" and gotten all the course information in a week. And good luck on your job search; it sounds like you have several promising leads.

I'm sorry that the skating club looks to be very disorganized this fall - I know you were looking forward to getting back on the ice so much! Hopefully someone will step up in the organization and keep it moving. It would be so much more difficult and so much more $$$ to have to join the Lake Champlain club and purchase ice from them, so disappointing when you've got that great rink just behind your dorm!

For kicks and giggles, check out the MN State championship results on http://www.tcfsa.org/ . Braemar didn't acquit itself too well this year.... If the McCandless competition were any predictor, Lydia would probably have finished second or third in Open Juvenile. But that doesn't bear thinking about now.

Dad starts playing for St. Bartholemew again this Sunday, so we are officially back in the school year schedule. He's coming to realize that life as a freelance musician isn't looking like a very lucrative career in the coming years, and that he's probably going to have to branch out and take a daytime job - his mornings and afternoons are completely empty, now that Lydia doesn't need transportation to the rink and takes the bus home from school. I'm going to keep looking for some sort of driving job for him in the mornings; I think he could deal with that better than a job in a coffee shop or a Target store....pray for me

Happy Thursday! and big hugs to you!
Love,
Mom