Or as I like to call them sweet potato dumplin’s. This is a recipe that I found in the fabulous Martha Hall Foose’s Screen Doors and Sweet Tea. I love this cookbook because it reads more like a novel then a cookbook. Martha is a Mississippi native that studied fine cooking in France, but came back to Mississippi to cook. She tells all about the characters her recipes come from with love and flair. I have sat and enjoyed just reading her cookbook as much as I enjoy reading Harper Lee.

I’m not going to post the recipe here for copyright reasons, but I urge you instead to purchase her cookbook. It’s worth more than the $10 I paid for it for sure.

Anyway, these sweet potato dumplings in her book got the best of me. Try as we might, Dave and I could not figure out how we were suppose to make them. Try for the life of us we could not figure out what “Form the dough into a ball. Cut it into four equal wedges. Working from one wedge at a time, roll the dough into four ropes about 3/4 inch in diameter. Cut each rope into 3/4 inch long segments. Roll each segment across the tines of a fork, pressing down slightly to form a depression in the middle with your fingerprint.” Of all the recipes not to have a picture in her book!

You might think we are idiots that we could not figure this out, but we couldn’t. I tried by myself several times. I called him for help. He gave instructions, watched me work on our 2 foot in diameter table, very puzzled as well. We eventually rolled out the dough, cut it in half to freeze half of it and attempted our best to make ropes out of the other dough. We did not do Martha Hall Foose proud, I can tell you that for free.

Maybe that’s because neither of us have ever made dumplings before. Maybe you have to be with a grandmother the first time you make dumplings, or maybe you have to be a grandmother to make dumplings.

Regardless, our dumplings ended up looking like this:

The dumplings were still tasty though, so we’re not upset by any means of the shape.