Last weekend, my lovely wife had a few of her classmates over for dinner and a movie. For dinner, we made homemade dumplings from “scratch,” except for the skins which were store bought. We must have made close to two hundred dumplings, evenly split between a shrimp and pork filling and a pork and cabbage filling. After a quick 12 minute steaming, a little crisp frying in some sesame oil, we enjoyed the dumplings with some wine.

We made as many dumplings as we had store-bought dumpling wrappers (or are they called skins?) and we still had filling left over, about a cup and a half worth of each. Since raw shrimp and raw pork don’t last very long in the fridge, we needed to make up the rest of the dumplings quickly and pop them in the freezer.

So last night, after an afternoon of football games, I found myself at home with no skins… so I thought I’d try to make skins from scratch.

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My wife told me that when she was a child, her mom would make her homemade apple pie on the first day of school. Now I, being the awesomest husband in the world, remembered this and decided I’d surprise her after her first day of grad school. I thought it was going to be harder but it turns out making homemade apple pie is remarkably simple. From start to finish, it took this pie novice less than an hour to make (minus the crust, which I cheated on).

(that photo is of the actual homemade apple pie I made, you can tell it’s homemade because of the smile! )

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Last year, I wrote about how cheap it was to butcher your own chicken. When you buy a chicken at $0.99 a pound, you get about a 50% return on all the cuts you get, not including the leftover bones you can turn into chicken stock. For the last few months, I would just turn the entire chicken into a big chicken noodle soup but now that winter is almost over, we won’t be eating quite as much chicken soup.

So, I got to thinking, why not just schedule a week of chicken meals based around one chicken? We already make each one of these dishes individually, why not just schedule them in a row and just buy a chicken at a time? There is no why not, here’s a perfect five day schedule of meals based on what you can do with one whole chicken. A quick word of advice, my “recipes” are based on memory and hardly have any quantity figures. Ask my wife, I cook like this; I sort of just wing it until it tastes and looks about right. If you don’t like cooking without exact measurements, just take the names of the dishes and use a site like AllRecipes to find a suitable recipe.

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