Dumplings.

I keep frozen dumplings and beans around because they are a very quick Asian meal to steam or boil or microwave up. My friend Caroline gave me a dumpling making lesson last year, and I also bought a dumpling folder at bec's garage sale, so I finally decided to have some dumpling fun last night, mainly because there was NOTHING at all on tv (apart from snog marry avoid, obviously) and I needed food anyway.

So I bought the pasty wrappers, a pack of 30 for $1.70, and 500g pork mince for $6, and a packet of frozen spinach for $2, and also some chives in a tube, cos I like pork and chive dumplings. It's a bit fancy.

The important thing is squeezing ALL the water out of the defrosted spinach. Then mix it with the raw mince, flavour it, and put a teaspoon in each wrapper. The dumpling folder was too small for the amount of filling I wanted, it kept breaking them, so I just folded them myself. Maybe I over filled them, the proof will be in the cooking.

Cost about 30c per dumpling. I'm sure that could be cheaper. Also, if I had more wrappers and filled them less, might be better, I'll find out soon. Interestingly all the shop dumplings weigh exactly 20 grams each. Exactly. Mine weigh 23 grams, average. Well, I find that interesting anyway. I recently got kitchen scales and I am having fun with them.

Here are both sorts of dumplings, ready to freeze.

Here is the leftover mixture. Not that pretty, but you can see what's going on. Caroline says you can put anything in a dumpling, as long as you squeeze all the water out of it. Any kind of mince or seafood, any kind of soft vegetables and green stuff. I'd probably add grated carrot and things next time.