Thursday, March 31, 2011

Lunch from Home: Vegetable Dumplings

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Daughter has a new compartmentalized insert for her lunch box, and used it to pack one of her favorites: dumplings.

On a recent trip to Charlottesville, Va., we stopped on the way home at a huge Korean supermarket in Fairfax County. We have several Korean markets in the Washington area, but the "Super H" is by far the most spectacular, almost the size of a Walmart with food courts, a stupendous produce selection, a mile-long seafood display and aisle after aisle of Asian products you've never seen before.

The freezer aisle boasts every imaginable kind of Asian dumpling and we stock up. They are quick to heat and pack for lunch. And while I can't guarantee the ingredients would pass the food police, they beat the heck out of a lot of the other junk kids crave.

One word of caution: best not to spread that soy sauce around so liberally. It can cause quite a mess.

As you can see, daughter also selected a package of what turned out to be animal crackers. The script describing the contents is, for us, completely indecipherable. She also packed some cheese curls and chocolate treats from a gourmet shop in Charlottesville, gifted to us in exchange for me participating on a panel discussion following a screening of the film Lunch Line.

Thanks to the organizers for making that trip possible.

2 comments:

  1. It's great that your daughter is excited and open to trying food from other cultures. Hopefully, by bringing these items in she's at least sparking the curiousity of the kids around her as well.

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  2. You know the irony of this great lunch you packed for your daughter?

    It wouldn't be allowed to be served under the new USDA proposed guidelines because of the high sodium content from the soy sauce.

    And they wonder why we are telling them to (as you so eloquently put it) stuff it.

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