Last night, I spent a good amount of time working on my dumpling filling, and I was so exacerbated by the frozen “shepherd’s purse” (qi cai) Chinese vegetable that I’d purchased from a Chinese market. The whole idea of buying them was to 1) try a vegetable I wasn’t familiar with, and 2) include it in a cooked and prepared form in the dumplings I was making. What I wasn’t anticipating after defrosting them was that these vegetables were not prepared at all; they were literally ripped out of the ground, roots and all, rinsed, and then frozen. I had to dig through every single strand of leaf to rip off the bottom roots. I couldn’t believe how poorly prepared these were.

It just goes to show how Chinese packaging from China works. They really don’t want to make your life easier the way you thought they would.