A Dumpling Recipe Worth Preserving

I've been making chicken and dumplings for decades now.  It's never been my favorite, but it's comforting and homey and good for a blustery day and/or when we're sick.  I thought yesterday would be a blustery day, so I planned to make chicken and dumplings, since we'd already had a pot of chili earlier in the week.

In September 2020, during our vacation at a timeshare in Hilton Head, we made the best chicken and dumplings I've ever made, a dish so delicious I'd have it outside of blustery/sick days.  In the years since, I've tried to recreate that dish.  Was it the raw celery I used to make the stock?   Was it using an uncooked chicken instead of the bones left over from other meals?  The dumplings were fluffy in a way that I've never had before.  Was it the self-rising flour? 

Yesterday, I made the worst batch of chicken and dumplings ever.  Even though I used a raw chicken and cooked it for hours, with carrots, celery, and onions, along with dry herbs (basil and oregano), the stock was the blandest stock ever to come out of the Berkey-Abbott kitchen.

The dumplings were worse:  gluey and dense.  We cooked them two, three times as long, and we still couldn't get them to cook through.  

Much as I wanted to dump the whole thing and order a pizza, we decided to try to salvage the meal one more time.  I went to this website and decided to try the recipe for dumplings.  They were so good that I'll post the recipe below, in case it disappears.  We added more salt to the broth, and we had a decent meal.

I will say that I'm grateful to have a dishwasher on days like yesterday.  We dirtied almost every mixing bowl in our quest for an edible dumpling.

Dumpling recipe:

Mix one and 1/3 C. flour and 2 tsp. of baking powder, along with a grind or two of salt (about a tsp).  In a different bowl, combine 1 tablespoon of melted butter with 2/3 a cup of milk.  Add the liquids to the flour and mix very briefly--overmixing is the death of dumplings.  Drop the dough by spoonfuls into the pot, lower the heat to a simmer, cover the pot, and let it all cook for 15-18 minutes.  The recipe says to resist the urge to lift the lid during the simmering process.