Dumplings eaten, cookies baked!

Update as promised on Sunday's activities -- the dumpling place Chris and I wanted to try out and the cookies I wanted to make.

Both successful! Yes!! Happy foodie Laura.

Dumpling place -- The dumpling place is called E Tao and we were told by a mutual friend that it had really good soup dumplings. Now, any time we hear this we're a bit skeptical because another place in Houston we heard had good soup dumplings had dumplings that could not at all be called soup dumplings. (This place will remain anonymous.) With soup dumplings, you are supposed to eat them with chopsticks, a small bowl and a spoon-- you know the type, the ones you always see in Chinese restaurants. Easiest way to eat them is hold them up over the spoon and the bowl with the chopsticks, bite a small hole into the side and then tip it over the spoon to let the liquid inside, the soup!, pour out into the spoon/bowl. Sip the soup, eat the dumpling. Delicious. The place-that-shall-not-be-named we went to several months ago had a dough that was too thick and the dumplings soaked up all the inner soup so when you bit the little hole, one drop came out into the bowl and nothing more.
E Tao's Shanghai soup dumplings have it right though. Delicious! Probably as close to the soup dumplings we had in New York City as I'm going to find in Houston.
E Tao also had awesome steamed barbeque pork buns. The dough was thick and soft and the meat was a little bit sweet. When I go back again, I'm really not sure what I want to order more of -- the soup dumplings or the pork buns.

Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Spice Cookies -- I got really busy on Sunday so I didn't end up making the cookies until last night. They were amazing!! So here is the Pinterest version. I figured, a can of pumpkin, a box of spice cake? I can handle that. I love recipes that don't have a mile long list of ingredients. I also chose to add in a bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips. Chris was gaming when I chose to make these, so I decided not to use the stand mixer. Love that thing, but it is loud.
The pumpkin is soft enough you can easily mix it all up with just a fork. The hardest part of making these was spooning out the little blobs onto the cookie sheet. I tried using my rounded tablespoon as the recipe suggested, but the dough would not come out of the spoon. I ended up making the first batch a little big and very oblong. I'll have to make them again and perfect how to make them the little neat rounded shapes that you see in the Pinterest version. I ended up baking them about 16 minutes total to get them a nice golden brown. It made a total of 4 dozen.
And I am going to make them again. They're delicious! And super cheap and easy to make. They're still soft today, and now that they're cooled I can taste more of the spice cake.
If I have any complaints it's actually that they're maybe a little too soft. Maybe they'll harden up in a few days but I don't think so. There is a lot of soft, moist pumpkin in there.
Now are these things healthy for you? Probably not. I started to add up the calories in the spice mix, chocolate chips, and pumpkin, and then divide it by 48, but said nah. Don't want to know. You can do the math if you want to. Leaving out the chocolate chips would cut the calories significantly ... but why would you want to do that??
Now I have to find more super easy two ingredient cookies... I'm really curious to see what else I can do with box cake mix. It's so versatile and so easy to keep on hand in the pantry.

Now enjoy some pictures, straight from my phone -- thanks Google+ app!!

 My ingredients!

 Plop the pumpkin into the bowl...

 And the cake and the chocolate chips and stir stir stir until you get this!

 Making little cookie blobs on the cookie sheet. And oh my goodness, I love baking on parchment paper. No Pam needed, they slide right off! And then you can just pick up the paper and let them cool and use the sheet for the next batch and clean up is so easy!

See, they're a little big. And very irregular shaped. Especially when in comparison to Pinterest's version:

But mine have character!! And chocolate chips.

Probably my last blog of the week... Working out with a friend tonight and doing laundry, then tomorrow and Thursday I'm working the Madonna concert. Going straight from my office to meet with retail on the main concourse; I'm not expecting to get out until midnight both nights. Gotta earn some commission though -- I want an iPad! Then Chris and I are going to Dallas for the weekend for a Halloween party with his friends.