Cooking with Facts: Apple Dumplings

Whether female, male, old or young; every chef has a beginning, just as every person does. We all get our facial features and hair types from somewhere, just as we get our love for baking, reading, writing and or such from someone- though, who that ‘someone’ is depends on the particular person we’re talking about.

For me, the one that instilled an adoration for shiny utensils, bare ingredients and sometimes difficult to follow directions in me was my dear mother, who, in her prime time, was the absolute best cook I had ever come across. When I was younger, she always had a new recipe in store for my siblings and me to try; something of her large collection that would make our fondness for her grow to an outstanding level- which sounds terrible in a way… loving our mother for her cooking… even if it was that good… Either way, she was the perfect example of a hero in my eyes (for various reasons of course), and her natural talents such as cooking were like added bonuses that I was lucky enough to see unfailingly in action those first couple of years.

Though my mom doesn’t cook very often nowadays, her ‘legacy’ of sorts still lives on through the dishes she has come to make on a monthly (more like every other holiday) basis.

One of these few keepsakes is the apple dumpling.

A recipe composed of my grandmother’s apple tart dough and my mother’s ingenuity: the dumpling has a tart sweetness and certain crispness to it that makes it a family favorite. It’s not overly ‘savory and bold’, nor excessively ‘sugary and light’; making it perfect (in my opinion) for more serious occasions.

Recipe for Homemade Apple Dumplings:

Ingredients (Dough):

  *2 ½ sticks of butter

  *2 cups of flour

  *2 tbsp. of vinegar

  *10 tsp. cold water (¼ cup)

  *2 eggs

  *Pinch of salt

  *4 tbsp. of sugar

  *1 tsp. of vanilla extract

Other Ingredients:

  *Apples

Directions:

1. Put all dough ingredients into a bowl and knead it.
2. Put into refrigerator for an hour to chill.
3. Cut apples into halves, remove seeds and peel.
4. Take dough out of the refrigerator.
5. Section dough into 4 balls.
6. Sprinkle flour on a flat surface.
7. Place a ball of dough onto the flour and roll out.
8. Cut rolled-out dough into fourths.
9. Place apple slice in center of a fourth of dough, and fold dough around apple.
10. Place on cookie sheet.
11. Repeat steps 5 through 10 until all fourths of dough are used.
12. Bake 30 minutes at 350 degrees.