Field Trip

Tom and I decided to make dumplings the other day. I’d been wanting to make them again since the last time we made them and forgot how fun it is to just set aside an entire morning devoted to cooking. I adapted this recipe by changing the filling. I used red cabbage, carrots, red onion, and shallots. Everything else was by the recipe, including the wrappers. I did double the wrapper recipe and had precisely the correct amount of filling to go with all the wrappers. We didn’t do a full meal from China, but these little dumplings were so full of flavor that we ended up only eating them for lunch that day.

We can’t travel right now, but we can certainly transform our kitchen into a place of wonder and adventure. While we are cooking something from another country, we talk about things from that country a lot. Here are some jumping off questions to start the conversation, although the ideas are endless:

• What do you think the children there are doing now?
• How often do you think they eat [insert what you are making]?
• What do you think their school is like? How is it different than yours?
• What time is it there now?
• What do you think the weather is like?
• Talk about different artists or scientists from that country.
• Play music from that country while you cook. It could be any genre that you prefer.

What other questions would you ask to start the conversation with your children? – Erin