Sage corn dumplings

Let it be stated that dumplings are my wife's family recipe. Not mine. Their holiday tradition on Christmas eve is to have shrimp/egg salad, fresh mushroom soup, some salad and vegetables, and of course dumplings. At this point I've had countless of these meals (mostly because I can't count).

The shrimp salad has varied from good, to fantastic. One time they had to use langosteens instead of shrimp, with great results. My brother, Ted, was raving about this years afterward.

The mushroom soup is a rich, hearty cream of mushroom soup. Start with Campbell's cream of mushroom and then add lots of fresh cooked mushrooms. Don't be too fancy, just use the standard white button mushroom and perhaps some creminis. And don't forget the butter.

But it was always the dumplings that were the heart of the meal. However, flour is one thing I just haven't cooked with much, and so it was a challenging and daunting recipe for me to even contemplate. I mean, the ingredient list is enough to scare off anybody sane: flour, eggs and that hard-to-find milk. The eggs shouldn't be from any old animal, but should be from the elusive "chicken". Good luck finding those! And the cooking process requires years of practice to learn how to boil balls of dough in water. Yeah ... right.

To make matters worse, Sarah's mom visited and a friend of ours had these dumplings 5 years ago and has raved about them ever since, begging us to make them again. Of course, not knowing the secret to this rare and mysterious dish, I could only return her helpless pleadings with a blank, clueless look.

It was two or three Christmas Eve's ago that I had finally had enough. Butter that is. You see, Sarah's parents fry the dumplings in butter for a one reason. Lots of butter. So the dumplings just become conduits for butter and salt. They taste great, but they were just too rich for me. So the next time I had them I vowed to have some plain, un-butterfied ones. And they were fine, though a little on the plain side. So the next time I visited, I tried frying the dumplings for a good long time, so they would get a nice browned butter crispness. And that was very tasty, though still too rich.

(Pictured: corn sage dumplings just out of the boiling water, waiting to be fried up. The pan is a Scan Pan, which is partially non-stick but can be cleaned with steel wool. The grass is watered 3 times a week.)

The breakthroughs came in a hurry, over the last 4 month interval, when we were visiting her parents place regularly. (1) Use olive oil instead of butter, which does not make the food seem so over-the-top rich. And it fries a bit better than butter. This was a smashing success. (2) Let's add some fresh herbs to the dumplings. The first time I tried rosemary and basil. The rosemary was quite nice but the basil washed out completely in the process of boiling, which I suspected it would. At home, I dared to make these dumplings on my own and then tried sage which was surprisingly good. (3) I've begun using a lot of fresh corn cut from the cob and inspired by recipes from the cafe at work, I tried adding fresh corn to the batter.

Voila! A true masterpiece. If you only try one recipe from my blog this is the one I recommend.

Sage corn dumplings
(Serves 4 to 6)

3 eggs, free range if possible
1/2 cup of milk, I use 2%
1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups of white flour
salt and pepper
medium handful of fresh sage leaves
2 ears of fresh corn, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 cups of corn
olive oil, for frying

Crack eggs in a large mixing bowl. Add milk. Beat eggs and add salt and pepper to taste. Add flour in 1/3 cup increments, mixing until the flour is fully absorbed, before adding more. This is neither a careful process nor a super fast process. Smooth out any large flour lumps, if necessary. The resulting dough should be a very thick sticky liquid. If it feels more like a solid, aka, you wet loaf of bread, add a bit more milk until the mixture thins out. It does not take much milk.

(Pictured: dumpling mixture with lots of corn and sage. The Domain Mourchon was a winery we actually visited on bike after a steep climb (according to my wife), and was a Wine Spectator 91, but I found it thick, dense but not that interesting, perhaps needing some more time. The Quivira was a good solid Zin.)

Wash sage and chop into small pieces. Cut corn off the cob. Add sage and corn to the dumpling mixture and mix into. This will roughly double the volume of the mixture.

Bring a large 4-8 quart pot of water to a boil, optionally using the corn cobs to flavor the water, which are then removed. Spoon dumpling mixture with teaspoons into boiling water. When the dumplings have been floating for 45-60 seconds they are done. Remove dumplings and drain.

Heat a frying pan with a thin layer of olive oil. When the oil is hot (a water drop splatters), add dumplings. Fry for a minute or so until the bottom side is browned. Turn dumplings and repeat until dumplings are browned to your satisfaction.

Serve as is with salt and pepper, or with a country gravy.

(Pictured: caprese salad with sun gold tomatoes, Costco rotisserie chicken, corn and sage dumplings, described in this article, mushroom chicken gravy and a date, orange, kumquat salad of arugula topped with Parmesan.)