Vegan Chickenless Dumplings

Holy Toledo it’s not 100 degrees today! I can actually enjoy cooking hot food again 🙂 In honor of a “cold front” in the middle of August, I’m going to share with you one of our favorite comfort recipes. This is something that we made pre-vegan diet that was relatively easy and quick to make. The dairy-free, chickenless version is just as easy, if not easier to make than the original. If you do the whole gluten-free thing too, it’s easy to sub.

This is one of my favorite recipes because of several things:

1. It only takes ONE pot and ONE bowl to cook in.
2. It’s delicious.
3. I never have to put leftovers away because there isn’t any.

I’m not entirely sure where my love of dumplings came from. I know my mother [probably] never cooked them (I also don’t know if I would have eaten them as a kid #pickyeater).  My grandmother might have made them, but then again, my grandma would make whatever I wanted to eat even if it was chocolate cake in the middle of the day… and again for dinner. I’m fairly confident that it was my husband that introduced me to the warm, creamy goodness of dumpling. This recipe is quite an upgrade though since I won’t be using any canned biscuits! It’s still nothing fancy but it’s ohhhhh so delicious.

The first thing you will do is get a big stock pot. Or cauldron, you know, whatever you have on hand. You will put your homemade vegetable stock in and start to heat it to a boil. Homemade veggie stock you ask? Well, you can find my recipe here.

While that’s heating up, you are going to make some bomb dumplings. For this, I used our vegan butter, Earth Balance. But you can use stick or spreadable margarine or butter. It’s whatever you prefer.  Add all of your dry ingredients into the bowl of a stand mixer or any ordinary medium sized mixing bowl. Whisk it together and then add the wet ingredients. Turn the mixer to medium and wait until the dough is soft and flakey. Like this. If yours isn’t looking like this, then keeping adding butter until it does.

Once you get the dough together, you will roll ping pong ball size pieces of dough and roll them into balls in  your hand. You can of course make them however big or small you want. If you make them bigger you will need to adjust the first cooking time by 5 minutes longer.

Once your stock is nice and hot, GENTLY drop your dumplings into the liquid. Once they are all in, cover your pot with a lid and let boil for 10-15 minutes. Make sure your pot doesn’t boil over.

While the dumplings are cooking, you could be an over achiever and chop up your own veggies to put into this OR you could use frozen like I do. We also used half a can of great northern beans. These are completely optional and added for extra protein. Especially if your bunch doesn’t like beans. Toss in the veggies once your ten minutes is up and cook for another 5 on medium high heat.

While the veggies cook, make your roux. Please make sure you have as few clumps as possible. No one likes floury chunky chickenless dumpling. Once the five minutes has passed for the veggies, ATTEMPT to take everything out of the stock pot except the broth. It’s totally okay if some of the veggies stay in there. Set the cooked ingredients aside while you pour in the roux and mix. Now put everything back in the stock pot. 🙂

Let it warm back up to a simmer and you’re done!