American Dumpling Stew

For this stew, a variant on German Dumpling Stew, you essentially have two parts, the stew and the dumplings. The first part, the stew, is left to the creativity of the cheff - there are few rights or wrongs about it, so long as the ingredients of the stew all go well with each other. It's also best that all vegetables be in large but manageable chunks rather than diced or minced, and placed in at least 4 C water in a large-mouthed steel kettle with a lid. The stew should be boiling on the stove, then turned down to medium or low, and should be filled to the top of the water with vegetables, and then the rest can be made while that's cooking. One "right" is having 3 ingredients for sure: carrots, celery, and potatoes.

The real reason people eat this is for the dumplings. They are also the trickiest. You can use all purpose or whole wheat or regular wheat flour (or any combination of these or possibly other flours). The only thing that matters is following a standardized formula, below:

2 1/2 C Flour (unstirred before measuring)
2 Tbsp. Baking Powder
1/8 tsp. Salt

1 C Water
1/4 C Fat (any kind).

Stir this into a light and fluffy, somewhat wet dough (there will be a small amount of flour that won't mix in, but that's fine). Using your hand or a teaspoon, generously pull off parts of the dough, aprox 4" balls. Lightly drop these onto the surface of the stew. The dumplings should rest nicely on top of the vegetables, and just a little bit into the liquid. Cover the surface of the stew completely with the dumplings. If there is any dough left over, fear not - it can be turned into crackers, or, if you like thick dumplings, you can just keep adding it on top, preferably in the places where any boiling water may be coming through.

Remember this: 10 on, 10 off.

What that means is that, as soon as the dumplings are all covering the stew, immediately put the lid on it, for 10 minutes. Once 10 minutes are up, keep the temperature the same, but take the lid off for the other 10 minutes. In the end, the dumplings will seem a little damp on the outside, yet even that will be cooked, and inside, they will be insanely fluffy. Add a bit of buttery goodness on top of them, yes, along with the soup, and enjoy!