I love dumplings. A must when I make chicken or beef stew. I also make a German style bread dumpling and Spaetzle another type of dumpling to serve with Goulash. Regular Dumplings 1-1/2 cups flour 1 tablespoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons shortening(butter/margarine or crisco 3/4 to 1 cup of milk Mix dry ingredients and cut in shortening. Add enough milk to make a soft wet dough. Drop by tablespoon on to the top of stew and cover and simmer on low for about 15 minutes. Southern Style Dumplings 2 cups flour 3 tablespoons butter 3/4 teaspoon salt Pinch of baking powder Milk Mix dry ingredients and cut in butter. Add enough milk to make a soft dough. Knead for a minute until smooth and let sit for 1/2 hour. Roll out dough to desired thickness. Dough should be on the thin side. Cut into 1/2 inch strips, 1 1/2 to 2 inches long. Drop into boiling stew and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes or until noodles are cooked. Parsley Bread Dumplings ======================= 1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley 2 slices white bread, quartered 1-1/4 cups all-purpose flour 1 teaspoon baking powder 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup milk 4 tablespoons butter, melted Combine parsley and bread in processor; whirl until medium Size crumbs. Add 1 1/4 cups flour, baking powder, and salt; process just until combined. Add 1/2 cup milk and butter; process using on-off pulses just until blended. 5 Drop mounded tablespoons of dumpling mixture into stew. . Add chicken to a pot and cover with chicken broth or combination of water and broth. Add 1 garlic clove, a few sprigs of thyme and bay leaf. Cook for 15 minutes and add whole peeled onions, celery cut into 1 1/2 inch pieces and simmer until onions are tender. Remove Chicken from pot and separate meat from bones. Add chicken back to pot. If using potatoes add now. Now add what ever dumpling recipe you are using and simmer until dumplings are cooked. If you like your stew thicker, mix some flour and milk or cream in a jar and pour into hot stew.

That sounds so nice. I might just have to have a preemptive Thanksgiving myself. I think pretty much any dough that holds together in a ball will cook fine. If it's so chunky that you can't get it to hold together, you might try pulsing it in the food processor. If it's too moist, I think adding flour, bread crumbs, or cornstarch would probably work fine. Turkey stew with stuffing dumplings is a neat idea!

Eric, In answer to your question posted in Kt's Sun on Clouds post: For some strange reason, all photos are loaded to my computer in a compressed form. For example, your top photo of flowers shows up as 9664 bytes, rather blurry looking. Now, if I want to see the original image, I right-click ON the picture, which brings up a menu of all kinds of options. I click on "show original image", and the compressed image disappears, then your image of 53,286 bytes loads, showing a beautifully clear image. Now I can only do this if I use Internet Explorer. If I use Mozilla Firefox as a browser, I can't see original images (frustrating, because Firefox runs faster, and stops a lot of pop-ups for me.) I guess it's a good thing, that all photos are loaded in compressed form because I'm on dial-up. The original photos would take incredibly long to load. Another example, your second picture is shown at first as 57,105 bytes, and it looks quite acceptable. But if want to see more detail, I load the original, and it takes much longer to load, at 223,034 bytes. Hope that explains why I'm seeing double. (BTW, I'm enjoying watching your landscaping project). Julie

This thread prompted me to make something apple with apple basket DH got at the hospital. I made an apple crisp/betty/cobbler. Anyway, it turned out very good. I threw some apple brandy in while cooking the apples. I made the crust with the dry cake mix and butter. Sherry/Sheshebop said not to use canned pie filling so this was my opportunity to ditch that habit. It was really easy to make from scratch. The most challenging thing was using the apple corer and getting the core out of the "gadget".