Something I always find hilarious: directions written in English-as-a-second-language. And since I’m married to an Asian guy with a penchant for shopping at T&T, I end up reading quite a few of them.

This weekend, we found a package of flour for making Há Câo (shrimp dumplings). And since we haven’t had many dumplings in our lives since we found out Min was celiac a couple years ago, we decided to try.

Here are my instructions, as they appear on the package:

Add 1/2 liter of water to the powder and stir it finely. (Leave 3 table spoons of powder for outer-covering) – cook it with dim fire and stir until the powder become somewhat thick (some are well done).

Add 2 spoons of cooking oil into the powder, rolling and stuffing it until become fine. Then piece it into small balls and put them on tray. (Remember to sprinkle dry-powder onto the tray in advance). Cover them with wet cloth to keep the balls from getting fried.

Sprinkle dry powder on to a chop before laminating the balls, put the inner in, fold up, and wrap it. Wet the autoclave with cooking oil then put the cake in, and cook within 5 to 7 minutes, when the pies are well done and prepared to serve.

Oh dear. There seems to be wet powder and dry powder, and if I don’t dry-powder the tray and then cover the wet-powder balls with a cloth, they’ll become fried? Maybe because of that dim fire. Wait, I think they mean “dried.” Okay, got that part. The end sounds tricky, though. Whose balls am I laminating, exactly? (Do you think I’m supposed to plastic-wrap them?) What the heck’s an autoclave? And where did all the cakes and pies come from??

This could be interesting. It might take me a couple days (weeks?) to get to this particular project, but I hereby promise to post the results when I’m done.