Happpppppppy Biiiiiiirrrrrtttthhhhday!

This week was my friend Yasmin's 25th birthday. She just moved into a new house by us and had a whole bunch of people over to celebrate. I was excited for two reasons: (a) I hadn't seen any of the people who also live in the new house in ages and, (b) our birthday present to her was an Ikea mattress we bought but couldn't use and weren't able to return which had been taking up an inordinate amount of room. Once the mattress was gone finally got our spare bedroom back. But I digress...

Aretha was in Calgary last week and we took advantage of the low sales tax and bought a brand new dehydrator. We have experimented with dehydrating food in our oven but its really inefficient and seems very wasteful. I had been wanted an actual dehydrator but wasn't sure it would be used enough to make the purchase worthwhile. As I prepare more and more raw food I am finding that at least half the recipes call for something dehydrated and with how poorly the oven worked we decided to take the plunge. Now we make so much more and the possibilities just keep coming. It was especially crucial for the dish we decided to take to Yasmin's pot luck birthday.
We had put off making Sesame Cashew Dumplings for a while as we didn't have the dehydrator so we figured this recipe was like killing two birds with one stone. Test out the dehydrator and cross another recipe off the ever growing list of delights. I did very little work in the preparing of them. Aretha did all the hard parts, of which there were many. The dumplings are wrapped in thin sheets of coconut which required the meat of 5 young coconuts, the removal of which is very time consuming for novices like us. We tried finding someone who sells just coconut meat in store but to no avail. We ended up buying the 5 Young Thai coconuts, cut them open, drained the milk, scraped out the meat, removed the bits of shell and finally blended the meat in the food processor until it was smooth. Then the meat was spread in thin sheets and dehydrated for 5 or 6 hours. Just getting to the point of putting the sheets in the dehydrator was nearly 3 hours. (The time frame was lengthened slightly by the fact that Aretha also had one eye on our new puppy Bamboo who requires a significant amount of attention.) The dehydrated coconut sheets were then used to wrap the dumplings. The recipe book calls for square pieces of the coconut sheets and recommends a square dehydrator. Sadly, our dehydrator is round. There is a lot of waste when cutting squares out of round sheets.  Next time we will lay out the processed coconut meat in square sections the size of each dumpling and fit as many as we can on the round tray to avoid the frustration in the future.
Inside the dumplings was a cashew filling with marinated spinach.  The cashew filling called for a quart of carrots and celery, and 4 cups of cashews, among other things. When mixing it all together it seemed like a lot, too much for the coconut sheets really, but who are we to question Mathew Kenney's expertise? We followed the recipe as instructed.  In the end, we were right.  By the time we had worked through all of our coconut wraps we were only a fraction of the way through the filling. The next day it we still enough filling to make for 8 rolls using rice paper as wraps and still we wound up throwing away a huge portion of it. Note to self: trust your instincts.
Whenever I make something new, that I haven't tried before, I am always really nervous about bringing it to a party. What if no one likes it and I will have to take a full tray of food home with me? Yikes! In this instance the result was bitter sweet.  Everyone seemed to like them since we left with an empty plate... however, they were scarfed down so fast I didn't even get to try one! Aretha said they were really good and I always trust her judgment. Plus, I liked all the individual ingredients when we had them in the rice paper wraps so it must have been good, right? Next time we make them I will be sure to save one or two at home. Selflessly of course so that I might more accurately report back to you, my faithful readers.