Chinese Cooking Class . . .

Yes!  I found one on the internet and sent the owner an email.  He replied back right away and said, "Come tomorrow!  We'd love to have to you."

I walked to my cooking class from my new hotel that's located in the Old French Concession area of Shanghai.

Stopped in this adorable coffee house for a vanilla latte on the way.

Passed this flower shop and thought of my BFF from the 4th grade, Krisinda Lou :-)

Found it! It was a nice 17 minute stroll.

Two instructors. She only spoke Chinese; he only spoke English. Today we're making spring rolls and bun dumplings from scratch. Mine will be vegetarian; everyone else's will have vegetables and pork.

Apron'ed up, and ready to do this!

First on the agenda was preparing the vegetables for the spring rolls.  Everyone got their own hot plate and a wok, and we stir-fried cabbage, bamboo, carrots, ginger, and shiitake mushrooms.  My classmates added in pork to theirs.

Here's what mine looked like when I was done stir-frying.

While the spring roll filling cooled, we moved on to making the bun dumplings. 

Everyone used a scale to measure out their flour. These four students are natives of China.  They don't speak English, but we made friends anyway.  One gave me a hug and her email when the class was over :-)

My little work station.

Next, we added water to the center.

Then we kneaded the dough.  I love that one Latina classmate brought her daughter along.

I made a perfect little dough ball.  This filling for the buns was pre-prepared by the kitchen assistants: bluntly chopped scallions, shiitake mushrooms, ginger, and bamboo (others had pork included).  We each got to add in olive oil, sesame seed oil, salt, sugar and green onions.

We cut the dough.

Rolled them into circles.

Added in the filing.   We folded the dumplings with a secret "1, 2, 3..." Chinese cooking technique to perfectly form the buns.

Everyone hard at work.  All of these ladies currently live in Shanghai, but are from South Carolina, London, Australia, South Africa, India, Mexico and China.

Time to cook the bun dumplings!  First we pan fried our own dumplings, and added in water for steaming.

Here are mine.  

Buns cooling, we then went back to the spring rolls.  We added the stir-fried filing on top of egg roll paper, and learned how to carefully roll them and seal them up with a little flour paste.

Mine look authentic, right????

Then I had to get the oil just right!

And dropped those babies in.

So geeked! Those are mine back there frying.

Ta-dah!  My vegetarian spring rolls and vegetarian bun dumplings.

We all sat together in the garden and ate our food.

So yummy!

Trying to get an up close of my vegetarian bun dumplings.  (At the end of the steaming, we added green onions and sesame seeds on top for garnish)

Another class in the next room (a private party) was busy making something with these.

This is what they made. Wow!  It's called Drunken Noodles. 

So happy I got to do this in Shanghai!  I can't wait to fix this for my hubby back at home.

~SS