June 21, 2020 Father’s Day. Breakfast – Tropical Fruit Salad with yogurt. Brunch – Chinese Dumplings, dipping sauce, melon salad, and Japanese Pickled Vegetables and Blueberry Cobbler and Chocolate Chip Cookies

June 21, 2020 Father’s Day. Breakfast – Tropical Fruit Salad with yogurt. Brunch – Chinese Dumplings, dipping sauce, melon salad, and Japanese Pickled Vegetables and Blueberry Cobbler and Chocolate Chip Cookies

This was a rather busy Father’s Day. When I awakened around 7:30 I made a new bowl of Tropical fruit Salad by peeling and dicing a papaya, a pineapple, two mangoes, and four oranges and adding the juice of two limes.  While I was making my salad Suzette was making the dough for Chinese dumplings.  The impetus for making dumplings was the disastrous overcooking of several country style ribs this week.  Suzette ground the meat up in the Cuisinart with water chestnuts, Mirin, and chives.  She also made a seafood stuffing with scallops, Mirin, water chestnuts and chives.

Suzette also made a dipping sauce with Mirin, sesame oil, rice vinegar, and soy sauce to which I added a few drops of sriracha.

We were able to made a few dumplings by 10:00 when we stopped to Zoom with Rebecca, Willy, Billy and Elaine.  We h ad received a call from Luke at 9:30 wishing me a happy Father’s Day because he had a noon appointment.

After the meeting we watched a couple of noodle wrapping videos and then tried out hands at them.  We set up a production line with Suzette forming and rolling out the round sheets of dough and me stuffing them and folding the dough wrappers.

We had a couple of false starts like not greasing the steamer rack in one of our steamers, but then we cut a sheet of parchment paper and fitted it to a steamer tray and steamed the dumplings in our steaming oven, which worked perfectly.  I liked the Dumplings sautéed in peanut oil. Suzette liked them steamed.

Willy arrived around 1:00 and we steamed the rest of the 30 or so dumplings we made.  Here are some pictures.

I peeled and diced ¼ each of the three Mellon’s we bought last weekend at Sprouts.

I opened a bottle of Chateau Touche Cotes du Gasgnone white and poured glasses and took the Japanese Pickled Vegetables from the fridge and we carried those to the garden table.  Suzette first sautéed the pork filled dumplings and then the scallop filled dumplings.  We loved them all, but decided it was not worth the effort.  Suzette said, “Dumpling restaurants must have automatic machines to prepare and shape the dough and make the dumplings because this is a lot of work.”

We were so stuffed we could not eat dinner but we made two desserts.  I diced a mango and Suzette made a mango and blueberry jiffy cobbler and I made chocolate chip cookies.

We watched our favorite Sunday shows, Grantchester and Beecham House and ate bowls of cobbler and vanilla ice cream for dinner.

Suzette went to bed at 10:00 and I stayed up to blog.

Bon Appetit