Making Korean Dumplings

  Saipan, Northern Mariana Isl.
Saturday, October 4, 2008

Thursday we went to the street market. It was very quiet, at least relative to how I've seen it in the past. The economy here is having troubles. Java Joe's is actually hurting from the fact that there is reliable power again. They would get a continual influx of customers taking refuge in the air conditioning with wireless because the power was out in their house, apartment or office. Now people can just stay put. There's a new flight directly from Shanghai to Saipan that just started this week. There's some hope that this will help.

The contrasts in the news are pretty striking. The governor wants to sue the US over the immigration federalization. The legislature won't give him the money and rightfully argues that it's too adversarial a stance for productive negotiation. He claims he can pull the $500K out of some slush fund he has somewhere, but no one thinks that will be nearly enough. And that money could definitely used to good benefit elsewhere. Also, on the same day there were two headlines, one saying that the government wanted to sell the utility company CUC for $250M and another saying that they had just approved a budget for the coming year of $165M. I know valuation and annual operations are very different things, but the contrast in those numbers of funny in a way. Especially since most of CUC's generators don't work right now and they're arguing over where they'll get the money to fix them. There's lots of outstanding receipts, including the public school system supposedly owing CUC $1.2M. It's just a big shell game.

So Sunday we're throwing a dinner party. Our place isn't really set up for anything resembling formal company, so we're doing most of the preparations and having the shindig at Alan and Stephanie's house. After grocery shopping and a quick tex-mex dinner at the Oleai Grill, a short walk from the apartment, we started making Korean dumplings from scratch. Suka started the dough. I finished kneading it while she made the filling. We petered out, so we have a lot of dumplings to make. This morning, we made a bunch for breakfast. Pretty good, but I have some practice and learning to do. Also, the dough was a little dry, so they didn't close quite as well as they should have.

Suka thought it was really funny the way I was filling and closing the dumplings. Apparently, I was handling them backwards from the traditional method. She liked the results, but described it as writing Korean characters so that they came out looking right, but the stroke order was all wrong. With a brush, that can be a very obvious thing. Hopefully, it wasn't as significant an impact. She had to take pictures. Unfortunately, most of them were blurry because the last time I used the camera, I had turned off the flash.