This is a story about how MT and I started out with a grand plan to make Chinese dumplings, failed, and ended up with some nice ravioli instead.
Well, we did make dumplings—close to a hundred of them, all hidden away in our freezer now—but I would very much like to ignore them because they taste quite mediocre. I believe the dumplings don’t taste as moist and flavorful as I had intended them to because there’s not enough cabbage in the filling, something I’ll need to correct next time I make dumplings from scratch. In the end it was the ravioli, the product of an afterthought, that stole the show.
I’d made dumplings from scratch with my family when I was little, but this was my first time attempting to do so on my own, and MT had never done it in his whole life. I just thought it would be a fun and relaxing activity for us to pass a Saturday afternoon with. Boy was I wrong. After an afternoon of mixing, kneading and rolling (MT was in charge of the chopping and wrapping) and creating just a hundred or so dumplings, we were both exhausted. My arms ached for two days afterward from the effort. Forget about opening our own little homemade dumpling shop!
I’m not in the habit of following recipes, so I decided to make my own “educated” guess for how much flour I’d need to make wrappers for one packet of ground pork (500 g). It turned out that I’d made too much dough. I needed to make a new filling in order to use up the leftover dough, so I randomly grabbed some items we had in our fridge—spinach, blue cheese, portobello mushrooms, some more ground pork, and garlic, all of which sounded more like ingredients one would use to stuff… ravioli. So we decided to just go with it and make ravioli.
Dumplings and ravioli are pretty much the same thing after all, just shaped differently. MT cut the raviolis into cute circles using an empty glass jam jar. He then made a delicious sauce for them by blending fried leeks and garlic with fresh tomatoes and sundried tomatoes and simmering them in a little broth.
The blue cheese, spinach and mushroom tasted so nice together. I wish we’d made more of these raviolis!
P.S. A few days later, MT did successfully remedy my flavorless dumplings by creating a wonderfully aromatic and savory sauce for them, using pureed celery, onion, ginger and vegetable bouillon, and garnishing with bacon bits and finely chopped spinach. Which is essentially treating them like ravioli… cooking Chinese dumplings Western-style. Oh well…whatever works…! :p 
