Oops, proofreading should be one word.

    Among my childhood memories, the homiest is the scene of egg dumpling making for the Lunar New Year.

    I grew up in a remote village between the Yangtz and the Huai rivers. There people get warm by burning charcoal in an iron pot in the winter. And Grandma would make egg dumplings with Mom on our charcoal warming pot, using a soup ladle.

    The work was usually carried out a couple of days before New Year's eve, mostly after dinner. While our whole family were sitting around the charcoal warming pot, chatting casually, Grandma set up her workplace by putting a little piece of lard or raw pork fat and a bowl of bitten beaten egg at her right hand side and holding a soup ladle in with her left hand. Heated on the burning charcoal, the stainless steel soup ladle became a mini nonstick frying pan after been being seasoned by a thin layer of lard. Then Grandma poured a teaspoon of liquid egg into her mini pan, shook it lightly, and a tiny little round egg crepe appeared. Now Mom, sitting next to Grandma with a bowl of ground pork mixture in her hand, put a proper lump of meat in with a pair of chopsticks, folded the egg crepe and closed it up, right in time before the egg became too dry to seal. An egg dumpling was done in just a few blinks of an eye.

    A big bowl of egg dumplings -- visually a full heap of gold treasure -- were easily made while we were still talking.

    I have been running on a very tight schedule lately and I wasn't planning to do any serious cooking for the Lunar New Year. But I failed to resisit the longing for reliving such sweet moments after they were recalled. So I bought a proper soup ladle from a local Chinese store, and made egg dumplings my old folk's way for the first time.

    The ingredients and recipe are extremely simple. The filling is made of lean pork, ground or finely chopped, well mixed with minced ginger, salt, white pepper powder and cooking wine, while and the wrapping just well beaten eggs with a tiny pinch of salt.

    With 5 onces of pork and 4 medium eggs, I made 30 egg dumplings and 6 mini egg crepes in less than an hour.

    Even though the photos I took with one hand while the other had to hold my mini "frying pan" were out of focus, the lovely scenes in my memory are very real and clear. After being away (from home?) for so many years, I am finally able to enjoy the old taste of New Year again. And the little town where I live right now, once an unreachablely unreachable far away foreign place, has already become my new hometown.