Kilali's Blog

Yesterday, my high school had our Lunar New Year celebration. For the past three years, I have been organizing the celebrations. This year, the teacher who supervises my planning wanted to have our celebration with the middle school, so we can get more students involved. I thought this was a great idea, but I was at first worried about how we would accommodate a lot more people in our activities, as we would be going from about 110 people to 180. This meant that I had to purchase a lot more materials for each activity so that all students and faculty could get participate. We also wanted to make sure we all were staying together and really integrating middle school and high school. For Lunar New Year, we always provide lunch, so I thought it would be good to serve food in the middle school, then require that everyone eats in the high school or on the quad. This way, we were all staying together instead of separating into our building. I think that this worked well to keep us all togeth...

Today, I started taking art of cooking course. We split into groups of three and then started to make dumplings. We started making the dumpling filling, and as we were combining the ingredients we realized that we messed up the lettuce. We were supposed to salt-wash the lettuce, but my group did not do that, so we were worried that the dumplings would explore if we steamed them. We didn't have enough time or enough materials to remake it, so we just kept going with the rest of the steps. We then learned how to roll out the dumpling dough. At first it was really difficult because the dough kept sticking to the table so it would break when I tried to pick it up. The chef teaching us told us to put more cornstarch on the table to keep it from sticking, and that worked so much better. We then went to shape our dumplings. The chef taught us three different techniques. One is basic, where you put the filling in the center then just fold it in half and then press. The second method was to...