I love to spread and share the wealth when it comes to cooking and eating dumplings. You don't have to do all the work. Let go and invite others to participate. Aside from organizing a dumpling making party, you can also hold a potluck! Over the weekend, I attended an Asian Dumplings cookbook club potluck organized by 18 Reasons, a non-profit organization in San Francisco that’s part of the Bi-Rite family of locally-owned businesses in the Mission district. About 20 people attended with an amazing array of dumplings prepared from recipes in the book. They totally strutted their Asian dumpling stuff.
My goodness — there were Korean mandu, pot stickers, Chinese poached water dumplings (shui jiao), Vietnamese water dumplings (banh bot loc), Shanghai soup dumplings, Filipino lumpia, spiced lamb Nepalese momos, Cantonese shrimp rice rolls, samosas, taro puffs, and Indian gulab jamun milk dumplings. I brought Singaporean spiced pineapple tarts. I’d never seen such a range of Asian dumplings in one place at one time (even my own kitchen). The potluck warmed the cockles of my heart and gave me a dumpling carb overload! (See photographer Emily Heller's montage of images to get a sense of how much fun we had.)
It was fabulous to hear people's experiences with making dumplings, how they didn't think they could do it and how they practiced and persisted. As someone at potluck said, "Dumplings are instant smiles."