chinese food and a cat

Today I learned that you can make rotation-diet-legal potstickers (aka fried dumplings or, if you're from around Boston, Peking dumplings). The hardest part was when my hands got tired mushing little chunks of dough into circles of dough. The easiest part was ignoring the multitude of directions I found on the web describing precisely how to enclose the meat mixture with the dough circles. The way you wrap the dough around the filling is exactly the way you'd make an air bubble the size of your thumb in a piece of silly putty so you could pop it, thus sort of replicating the sound of elementary school students popping their gum, a feat which was infeasible at my house due to lack of parental appreciation of chewing gum.

In other recipe news, it required a little cheating to have chocolate chip cookies for dessert, but less than normal because I learned that unsweetened chocolate doesn't contain soy lecithin. It just contains chocolate, and if you cut up some chunks of it and throw a little extra sugar in the dough, you get some excellent cookies. I suppose many people would object to the texture of the chocolate, which is why major corporations are always throwing soy parts and milk fat into it, but the flavor contrast -- slightly bitter chocolate next to sweet dough -- was a very pleasant surprise.

Ok, enough with the EI Food Network. This evening I learned that when cats drink out of the toilet, which I had heard of, not all of them jump up on the seat first.