Our first-ever batch of scratch-made homemade dumplings!

Yesterday's cool weather and the general sense of mild exhaustion that came following a two-night-visit from Caty at our new house led us to finally getting around to making homemade dumplings.

We followed China Sichuan Food's Dumpling Wrappers recipe for the skins, portioning the dough into 4 batches before further breaking those down into 15-12 portions per quarter. In total, about 50 dumplings were made — and about half were consumed! The remainder are freezing on a waxed paper-lined sheet tray in the freezer. As I got more practice, the dumplings became much more even in shape, too.

For the filling, I had to hand-chop a little over a pound of pork belly (my food processor simply didn't want to further break up the chunks I'd cut — a feat which my now slightly-sore right shoulder is a bit peeved about), a little less than a pound of cooked ground chicken (that Kara decided she didn't want to eat earlier in the week), a bunch of chopped green onions, a head of chopped garlic, a knob of chopped ginger, a few mushrooms I had leftover from an earlier pizza-making venture, Chinese cooking wine, tamari, President's Choice 5-Spice Blend, salt, white pepper, and freshly-ground black pepper. About 1/3 of the filling is unused and went into a freezer bag for later.

While these are far from the most photogenic of Chinese dumplings ever made, the flavour was phenomenal! I went heavy-handed with the ginger and don't regret it in the least.