WHAT?...FRUIT DUMPLINGS?

SWEET APPLE DUMPLINGS.

This is Ella, an Engineering student here at Shandong University and an one of our English students. She was hired to be Richard Watkins and my technical assistant to insure that our computers and electrical system is on and working in our classrooms each day. So she arrives before we do and turns on the computers, sets up our audio video systems, for powerpoint presentations, movies, pictures and such and checks the sound to the speakers. Those university computers are all in Chinese. Then at the end of our classes she returns to turn off the system and to turn the lights off and lock up our class rooms. She is an excellent "Teckie".

I took this photo as she left the classroom last week. She came to our apartment with several other English students last Sunday night for an historical event: The initial making of "Fruit Dumplings". Such has never ever been done in China. In fact, Ella stated that Chinese would never have thought of doing what we did to Dumplings. They would never put anything sweet into a dumpling. They just do not have such radical and weird things in China. Well, I decided to do it anyway and have been telling my students about my plans for a few weeks. They all said that Chinese would not like them and would certainly not eat such things.

I realized that I was going against the status quo, the government, and Chinese culinary rules.

So we made up a good tasting grated apple pie filling from scratch (my original recipe) with Ella and the rest of the students. We made two kinds of fruit dumplings: Apple and Peach.

This is the apple dumplings. Essentially, they are mini apple pies, deep fried, with powdered sugar sprinkled on top, but here everyone calls them dumplings. They are sweet!

Try this one, up close! The students whipped up a batch of fresh cream into "Whipped Cream", and then they dipped these little dumplings into that white, unknown substance and tasted them. You guessed it... They all like it. The peach ones were not quite as good, but when dipped into the whipped cream, they also downed all of them too.

WAR CRAFT MASK: At class last week, the students had "Show and Tell" This one guy brought his mask he made in his dorm room of one of the players in the computer game -- War Craft. They all play this games late into the night. I tried it on. He made it with paper, little rolls of cardboard and duct tape. I think he did a pretty good job considering it was adjustable to fit any big or small head. It looked pretty cool. He is an engineer and a pretty good artist I think.

Dana went out and just bought a new fridge. She just wanted a new one and saved up for it. We now have two fridges. The old one is in the sewing room and is overflow for food storage, for cold water storage and drinks. We like cold drinks in the hot weather. She paid a lot of money for it, $1000. yuan, about $140. American. We really like the new fridge as the bottom half is the freezer with lots of freeze space.