What's in a Dumpling?

It was a damp, windy afternoon in my little corner of Poland today.  As I waited for the train to take me from my new students’ office in Szczecin Dąbie back across the river, I felt like Autumn had arrived…a bit too abruptly.  But it is my favorite season (when I’m dressed appropriately for it), so I put my mind to thinking about all the nice things I associate with Autumn.  And that’s when I had a truly inspired idea.  I decided to try to make my mother’s homemade chicken dumpling soup.  I didn’t have a recipe, and with the time difference, I couldn’t really call and ask for one.  But the soup itself is not that complicated – it’s the dumplings that take some practice - so I figured the worst case scenario would leave me with a lot of chicken stock to use in another recipe. 

So off I went to the corner veggie stand and the shop just down the road for supplies.  I couldn’t find everything I thought I needed, so I had to make one or two substitutions. I chopped everything up, making some educated guesses with regard to quantities, and threw it all in a big pot.  And, much to my surprise and delight, before very long, my apartment filled up with one of my favorite aromas from my childhood – it was like being in my parents’ house in late November, and it brought back this incredible sense of warmth, ease and comfort. 

After an hour or so, I mixed together my best guess at what the dumplings might be made of and spooned the batter into the stock, fingers crossed the whole time.  And guess what?  I did it!  The dumplings were perfect, and the soup was awfully close to Mom’s.  I think the substitutions I had to make here in Poland made up the majority of the difference.  As long as food-poisoning doesn’t begin to set in before breakfast, I’m going to consider my efforts a roaring success!

check out those dumplings...

OK, excuse all the detail about cooking.  I really don’t flatter myself that most of my poor readers really give a damn what I made for dinner, but the point isn’t the food itself (though if you’re keeping score, I’m officially ticking off dish number three from item 74 on my list).  It never is with me, is it?  What was so great about this is what it stands for.  The last few years of my life have been full of upheaval.  Some truly amazing things have happened, and so have a few awful things.  I’ve felt lost more often than I care to admit.  And when I came to Poland a year ago, I kind of drew a line in the sand between my “old” life and my “new” life.  In some ways, that has been very good for me.  Letting go of hang-ups, searching for ways to define my life through more fulfilling endeavors, and dropping some very bad habits.  But it also cut me off from some things that have made me happy over the years.  And the more I pushed back against my past, the more disconnected I felt from any success or happiness I’ve felt in the present, because it wasn’t really me who was doing all of these things…it was this shiny new girl who lived someplace different and had an exotic new life.  Not to mention that it’s a lot of unnecessary pressure.  All that time, being worried that one wrong choice was going to send me into a tailspin that would put me “right back where I started,” as if that was even possible.

Well, going back to Wisconsin for a few weeks reminded me of something very important: you can’t change where you come from.  And you shouldn’t attempt to.  Trying to make a home and a life for yourself as an adult is scary, whether you do it 5 miles away from where you grew up, or 5000.  But there is a surprising amount of comfort to be found in being reminded of exactly who you are and just how far you’ve come already.  It puts things into perspective and makes “the future” seem so much more manageable. It’s just a series of small steps you take, steps that add to who you already were, rather than transforming you completely.  And the small pleasures will always be there.  They come from the flavors and smells of day-to-day life, and in tiny moments of recognition, like when you come back from vacation and see someone who was so recently a new friend, and the smile on their face looks like home.  And from the (probably excessive) pride you feel as a result of accomplishing something as simple as recreating the warm feeling of your old home however far away you happen to be now.  Even if all you really did was make some soup.