It’s been snow and ice here for the past few days, so I’ve been cooking winter comfort food. First was beans and rice with spicy chicken sausage, which came out rather excellently if I do say so myself.

Flush from that success, I decided to take on chicken and dumplings, which I hadn't made in almost ten years. Not just any dumplings, but (you guessed it) rosemary dumplings. It was quite a production. Family members were dispatched to the store for celery and cream. I browned three pounds of chicken, chopped onions and shallots and garlic, chopped carrots, chopped the celery when it showed up. Whacked up the chicken after it cooled and put it back in the pot. Poured in homemade chicken stock and then assembled the entire thing and let it cook for a while.

Then it came time for the dumplings. The batter was no problem to make: very straightforward concoction of flour, baking powder, salt, rosemary and milk. The recipe said to simmer them for 20 minutes. I didn’t want to boil the cream after I added it to the chicken, so I thought I’d cook the dumplings for about 17 minutes and then gently push them aside to stir in the cream and peas.* The dumplings were puffy and happily bobbing on top of the mixture when I added the final ingredients and put the lid on for another few minutes to let everything heat evenly.

I called everyone to the kitchen for dinner and, ladle in hand, proudly lifted the lid. There were no dumplings anywhere. Not floating on top, not lurking in the bottom. All gone. Does cream dissolve dumplings? Did the peas sabotage them? I can’t see that either of those hypotheses is likely. The only possible conclusion is that the dumpling pixie stole them.

*I generally disapprove of peas in just about anything on the grounds that they are somehow fundamentally wrong. But rhetoricians know that audience is everything, and my dinner audience demanded peas.