My mom makes the most fantastic food, be it Korean, American, Hamburger Helper... Recently I had the pleasure of eating mandoo, which is what you gringos call "dumplings." Mandoo, (or as my best friend's boyfriend calls'em, Man-dude -- he was a white farm boy) is a wonderful potpourri of food meshed and mixed together and stuffed in a flour wrap. The wraps, called pi-pronounced "pee" -- are usually round.

Not many people make these mandoos at home, because they take a lot of work. First all of the ingredients (there's a whole lot of them and vary greatly between different regions and families in Korea, or by which kind of mandoo you are making) must be prepared just right. Then they must be mixed, and somewhere along the line, you have to squeeze all the ingredients, which include radish, dang-myun(a type of greyish transparent noodles), various vegetables, ground meat, sometimes even kimchi. All the ingredients have excess water in them, especially kimchi and the vegetables. The excess water will make the fillings soppy and will not form a good mandoo. This is the hard part -- in my family, we do it by hand. Try to slice and dice various vegetables and squeeze excess water out of them! Takes immense hand strength, I tell you. That's where all the strenuous practicing on the piano pays off.

After the mandoo is prepared, there's many options that you must face. All equally delicious, those options pose tough decisions. Would you fry them? Boil them? Dunk them in soups? Would you steam them? Mmmm... makes my mouth water just thinking! Of course I already had a batch for dinner tonight, while watching the American Idol Christmas.

Here's a view of mandoos completely loaded and ready to go. The white flour wrapping is of course, the pi.

Here's a pic of them, fried in a frying pan:

They're golden treats! Yummmm yum!