We did a lot of playing in the kitchen this weekend, which, when I think about it, is pretty much what we do every weekend. This time, though, we remembered the camera (and the blog) BEFORE completing the eating. (This is key.)

If you’re here for knitting, you won’t find any today. I am hoping to play with buttons for my 28thirty. This week. Ahem. You heard it here first! Now, onward to the photo-documentation of this weekend’s kitchen-time.

I present Deb’s vegetarian dumplings. These are simple, fresh, and flavorful. (Like that, Champ?) In fact, after dipping our hands into the mixture before adding the egg, we siphoned off almost half of the tofu-veggies-ginger-garlic-seasonings “salad” to eat by itself. I actually ditched all the other dumpling recipes in my blue binder as a result of how tasty these were. You may recall that last time we followed a recipe that had us make our own wrappers and had a pork-based filling. Those were definitely very good, but these were incredibly tasty, and yet light enough that one could eat A LOT of them and not be incapacitated an hour later. I’m just saying.

This was more like kitchen sink sushi — filled with things that needed to be eaten, like asparagus and carrots, and topped with dollops of wasabi mayonnaise. When the boy makes sushi, I watch, and “help” by eating enough to keep some room on the cutting board for the next roll. Hey, somebody has to do it! (We had enough to pack sushi lunches for Sunday. I’m willing to argue that a sushi-lunch makes working on Sunday a tad easier.)

Okay, I may have misled you before when I said we took pictures BEFORE we ate. In this case, I just have pictures of these gorgeous treats before we prepared them: locally grown oyster mushrooms and ramps from the farmers’ market. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the oyster mushrooms sauteed with onions and the ramps fried in butter with a pinch of salt and folded into scrambled eggs were incredibly flavorful and delicious.

And then, as a mini-break from all of my reading and note-taking, I made Deb’s chocolate caramel crack(ers). This recipe may be joining the rotation of treats that get made with such regularity around here that the ingredients are always on the resupply list. I was eating these before the chocolate had fully hardened last night, and this morning, I broke off a small corner, just to see, after I snapped this photo. Delicious.

One last picture for you, of some of the daffodils I cut from the yard to brighten up my apartment. The forecast says it will rain all week, but at least I have daffodils in every room!