Dumplings!

It took me a while to get the weekly Gourmet Newsletter right.  I thought we'd be writing about all the great stuff we found out in the world, like the incredible Satsuma oranges that are available for just a couple of weeks every year.  Tiny, intensely flavorful and so irresistible that you eat a dozen before you  know it, they're a treat I want everyone to experience.  Or the amazing Richter raspberries, summer's ripest flavor, that come bursting out of the box, begging you to eat them.

Alas, it turned out that what people really wanted were recipes.  So that's what we started to give them, week after week.  It was easy - but pretty boring, at least to me.

Here, of course, I can say anything I want. And what I want to write about is the foods I find myself craving. Today it's dumplings from Supertaste on Eldridge Street, just below Canal.  Bud brought them as a Thanksgiving house gift, but we ate them so greedily every morning that now they're gone. You buy them frozen - 50 to a bag- and simply throw them into a pot of boiling water for 7 minutes.  The transformation - from frozen white lumps into knobbly little pockets of fragile dough filled with a sweetly pungent mixture of pork, garlic and scallions - is astonishing.  As they bubble merrily in the pot they send wafts of fragrant steam up into the air.  The anticipation is so intense that by the time they're ready to eat you're willing to burn your mouth, and you find yourself dumping them into the sauce and scooping them into your mouth without even bothering to let them cool downl.

Heaven.