Tuesday 22 October 2013

On Moving from Dumpling Taker to Dumpling Maker


This is my confession: for my first 50 years, I have been a dumpling taker and not a dumpling maker.

I have watched the making of thousands of dumplings. I have eaten that many again. I have devoted time and words to deciphering dumplings.

My virgin dumpling
But, the grand total output of my personal Dumpling Production Department has steadily hovered around zero.  I have been a dumpling pretender.

Perhaps, fear of failure. Or, perhaps, I’ve been following Billy Bragg’s lyrical advice: “The temptation to take the precious things we have apart to see how they work must be resisted for they never fit together again."


No, I know the real reason why. I haven’t been ready to make changes.

Picasso said: “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” And so it somewhat is with making dumplings and making changes.

Inspired by the recent National Pierogi Day, last week marked my inaugural attempt to make my ancestral dumpling, the Ukrainian varenyk. (I riffed on recipes in the most comforting cookbook by the Veselka coffee shop on East 9th Street and 2nd Avenue in New York City, http://www.veselka.com/cookbook/)

There’s an amazing amount of shape-shifting when making varenyky. First, the humble spuds go from their wobbly brown ovals to diced yellow rectangles to big spackle-like mass. This involves moving along a steady continuum of peeling, chopping, boiling, mashing, and blending with ricotta cheese and fried onion. 


As I go along, I’m reminded that, as a kid, I liked the reassuring symmetry of shapes and “making sets”. Now, in middle age, I am similarly attracted to “Physics for Dummies” in the hope of elegant and simple principles by which to make sense.

I think of the second law whereby energy can be neither created or destroyed, but can change forms and flow from one place to another. Here, I consistently apply energy to potatoes, onions, cheese, salt and pepper, and dough - and new shapes emerge.


As I move to fill the dough with the filling, I am nervous but loving how the many, the raw and the disparate become hopeful half-moons, lined in up in neat rows like entries in a nautical calendar. (Perhaps in homage to the heritage of my own heritage cuisine, I used store-bought "Double Merino" brand Chinese gow gee pastry, as dough making is still another change to come.)


I apply a delicate brushstroke of egg white and seal my varenyky, learning how much or how little filling to makes for the perfect fit. Sometimes, it’s a straight seal, sometimes a fold-over, sometimes the cheerful fence-post pattern of the fork’s tines. I learn as I go.

To get things right, I realise that there’s a certain regime that’s required. I need to be concentrated and purposeful, but I also need to have good “habits of the heart”. To feel the dense filling on the spoon, improbably heavy like mushy meteor rock. To salute the day with a nip of vodka – another potato potentate. To sense how much egg-white sealant is too much or too little, like a bird balanced on a waterlily. To keep count of how many made while not counting on a certain number to make.


I see that I need to go slow to get anywhere. I must be guided by the generousity of the experience rather than the generalities of expectation.

I look at my partner take up a pastry and some of the mushroom and sauerkraut filling I’ve also made. She gets it first go, and smiles. For her, giving seems as easy as breathing, while my own approach is asthmatic. 

For long have I been lost in the thinking rather than the doing about dumplings and life. Where to get the next one; the more exotic one; the one that no one else has had; the one that everybody else has and why shouldn’t I; the one that delivers happiness. I have let these thoughts have and hurtle me - rather than I have them and harness them.  

For me and for mine, there has been a high toll on this relentless road too often travelled.  The user is all paid out. Thankfully. 

While it’s still a struggle not to always speed ahead, I feel more ready than ever to shift down, to put on the blinker, and to exit. 

I watch my wife eat my first-ever batch of varenyky, including Dumpling #1. Something a little remarkable is happening: she is happy and perhaps I've had some role in that.


I have invested three hours of slowness; I have purposefully shaped something through time and effort; I have made good by making a change.




Friday 4 October 2013

Sydney's Dumpling Deluge and Wonton Wave versus My Ego


I don’t like being overtaken by events, but I know it’s almost always a good thing.

So it is with my dumpling devotion. It’s very rapidly gone from being “one of Shmigel’s forgivable eccentricities”, as a colleague generously described it, to me being just another member of the epicurean peloton.

I have fallen off my leading edge, and my ample bum has landed on the bench in the bullpen where the moustachioed long-relievers try not to check their phones.

It’s official. We are awash in the wonton wave; there is a deluge of dumplings across Sydney.

Dumplings are popping up more than pop-up’s in all sorts of places – pedestrian tunnels of train stations, suburban shopping centre food courts, and on my favourite meerkat Alesandr Orlov’s Internyets. (I insert here totally random but amusing video. Simples.)




Now that you're back... At approximately the same rate that mummies are not mummies without their own mummy blog, there’s a Chinese dumpling house opening in Sydney every proverbial. 

Even digital dumplings. There’s now a dumpling supplier who’s Facebook-bombing me. (Hmm... that's a scary search algorithm.)

Here’s some dumpling developments:

·      My Chef’s Gallery (Shop G24 Metcentre, 273 George Street, Sydney NSW 2000 (Entrance from George or Jamison Streets; www.mychefsgallery.com). When you are running to the office from Wynyard train station to get to that early meeting, and suddenly decide your sanity is more important than your client, this is where you can hit the pause button over decent dumplings in a quasi “Hello Kitty” setting. They’re open from 8am to 8pm so you can do an encore on the way home. Consumer warning: they’ve got a fishbowl out the front for watching the dumpling makers, which makes me at least feel kinda creepy.

·      Lotus Dumpling Bar (3/16 Hickson Road, Walsh Bay, across the street from the Sydney Dance Company, www.facebook.com/lotusdumpling). Dumplings for the cultural cognoscenti in the theatre and dance district. The black-painted walls and upscale pricing contrast the Chinese ladies sipping tea from chipped mugs while producing really good dumplings – including mushroom filling in spinach rice dough.

·      Lok Lok Dumpling Bar(s) (www.loklok.com.au; six locations in food courts across Sydney: Hornsby Westfield, Parramatta Westfield, Rhodes Shopping Centre; Miranda Westfield, Castle Hill Castle Towers, Waringah Shopping Centre). You can steal McDonald’s free Wi-Fi while munching on their mass-produced but surprisingly good fare. They do a couple of nice variations on theme: triangle-shaped dumplings with chicken mince, or pan-fried xia long bao (Shang-hai soup-inside dumplings which are almost always steamed).

·      Dumpling Hut (https://www.facebook.com/dumpling.hut123?fref=ts). This is an on-line dumpling dealer that I haven’t tried yet, but how about this offer: “a free Chinese steamer basket with your first order!” Steak knives have been laid to rest.

As all of this dumpling ubiquity arises, as everybody from Surry Hills hipsters to Baulkham Hills hip-replacements becomes au fait with jiao ji, I have my reminders:

·      Chinese dumplings – like Ukrainian vushka dumplings at Christmas – sprang from feasts of sharing. By contrast, there’s that feast of self-indulgence in Monty Python where the guy explodes at his table. I don’t want to explode.
·      The world is definitely not my exclusive oyster – or my potsticker. I am thankfully insignificant.
·      Annica is the Thai Buddhist notion that everything is impermanent. Everything changes; everything ends. I can’t control it.
·      And, it all is beyond our reach. That’s entirely okay because what is not in our reach is probably held by a Higher Power who is much smarter.

Tim Minchin recently and remarkably riffed on some similar stuff: Life is meaningless…  The only sensible thing to do with this empty existence is to fill it.” . Just as we fill and are filled by our daily dumpling.