corn dumplings

We found an old vegetarian cookbook in a book-sharing shelf. We must have spent an hour reading through it, the recipes were fantastic, the title read The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook. The cookbook had an entire section dedicated to cooking with corn. It's there that we found a recipe for masa dumplings.

Masa is corn that is simmered and ground into a paste and is the base for many recipes. You can make Mexican-style tortillas with it, that, or you can use it to make dumplings! We don't have access to fresh corn, nor do we have the space or the time to make my own masa, but we used corn meal instead and it worked! The only difference is that you need to add boiling water so you can roll the mixture into balls. If you were to use masa, you wouldn't need the added moisture.

The texture of the dumplings is fun and chewy. The outside is soft, but the inside is like that of dense cornbread.

Recommendations:

We enjoy eating it with tomato sauce or with a spicy apricot sauce. Instead of apricot jam, you can add apricot juice to the mix (orange will taste wonderful too). We added jam because I didn't have any juice on the boat, and besides, it works well in this recipe.

Adding extra spices, like cumin, chili flakes and turmeric will add a nice flavor to the dumpling mix.