To make the dough you will need:

• 4 cups flour
• 1.5 cups warm water
• 1 t salt
• 1 T sesame oil (if you don’t have this, you can use vegetable oil)
• 1 T vegetable oil

Combine the warm water, salt, and oils into a bowl.  Mix until the salt dissolves.  Stir in the flour.  You want the dough to look dry, you may need to add more water.  You do not want the dough to be sticky, it should just barely be able to clump together in a ball.  Cover with saran wrap and set aside for 15 minutes.

I then proceeded to make the pea filling:

To make this you will need:

• 2 cups of cooked peas (I just used the frozen peas that you can cook in the bag)
• 2/3 cup of cottage cheese
• 1/3 cup of shredded parmesan cheese
• 1 T sesame oil
• 1 T olive oil
• 1/2 t sea salt
• 1 T lemon juice

Combine your cooked peas, cottage cheese, sesame oil, olive oil, and sea salt in a blender (our recently broke after trying to make a huge batch of hummus, so I used our magic bullet).  Blend until smooth.  Place into a bowl and add parmesan cheese and lemon juice.

Making the dumplings:

You can now go back to the dough.  Get out a rolling pin, flour your work surface, place 1/3rd of the dough on it and proceed to roll out.  I have not rolled out dough very many times in my life and therefore was not very successful at getting it as thin as I would have liked, but oh well.  Practice makes perfect right?  As you can see I was experimenting with the size the dumplings should be.  I ended up going with the “coffee mug” size.

Scoop the filling onto the dough and close.  I ended up stretching the dough quite a bit in order to get the dumplings to close properly and had to take out some of the filling in the first batch attempted.

There is a delicious soy-ginger sauce that goes very well with these:

• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 T lemon juice
• 1 t sesame oil
• 1/2 t ground ginger

You then cook them in the oven at 350 degrees for 15-20 minutes.  Or you can fry them in a pan with oil.

I forgot to take a picture of the end result, woops.  But I am sure you have all seen dumplings…..  A couple of them popped open while cooking, so be sure to adequately close them to avoid this.  Next time I attempt to make dumplings I am going to try a meat filling of some sort and will pan fry them.

Recipe adapted from WhiteOnRiceCouple.

Whenever I make banana bread I remember a story of when my mom made it when I was little.  I’m not going to lie, the thought of putting bananas into bread was not appealing for me when I was little.  I must have been with my mom when she was making the banana muffins, because I knew that there was no way I was going to eat them, I mean come on, there’s bananas in it, yuck!  Well Alanna must not have been around when this was going down, because I remember walking into our dining room when she was eating one.  I asked her, “how’s the muffin?” and she replied, “it’s really good.”  I then asked her, so…do you know what kind of muffin that is? (I couldn’t believe that she was brave enough to eat it, so I had to ask if she knew what she was eating)  Alanna replied, “um…duh it’s a regular plain muffin.”  I quickly informed her that no, it was a banana bread muffin.  Of course she didn’t believe me at first…I think she may have even asked my mom what kind of muffin they were.  As soon as she realized that it was, in fact, a banana bread muffin, she pushed the muffin away with a disgusted look on her face like yuck I can’t believe I was eating that.  But we are both grown up now and love banana bread.

Here are some baking pictures of the peanut butter banana bread.  If you are interested in trying it, you can find the recipe here: http://www.joythebaker.com/blog/2011/02/peanut-butter-banana-bread/