Stonington Woman Makes and Sells Dumplings Made with Globally Inspired Ingredients

Morsel Dumplings Salsa Verde Chicken Meatballs (Submitted)

Morsel Dumplings’ Pork and Broccoli Rabe Meatballs (Submitted)

Terese Kung (Submitted)

Like many people, Terese Kung has been cooking a lot more during the pandemic. She’s been making a lot of dumplings, which is a comfort food for her.

One day, her husband, Tom Scally, suggested that she replace traditional Chinese dishes with ingredients from an Italian dish she makes for him, orecchiette and broccoli rabe. The idea was simply to offer something different, and he loved it.

From then on, Scally only asked for meatballs made with that.

“I thought, ‘Maybe we’re on the right track,'” Kung said.

She started experimenting with different flavors. Then she settled on chicken salsa verde because she and her husband love Mexican food.

Kung, who split her time with her husband between their homes in Stonington Borough and New York City, brought the dumplings to parties and her friends loved them, asking how they could get more and if she could bring them to the next party.

“Last year, a series of things happened in my life, a confluence of events, that made me ask myself, ‘If I don’t do this now, when will I?’” Kung said. “I got laid off from a corporate job. My father passed away last year. A lot of things happened, and it made me ask myself: What brings you joy? What makes you happy? What fulfills you?”

So here’s what she did: she created her own product, Morsel Dumplings.

She makes the meatballs herself by hand at Fresh Harvest Kitchen in Westerly and sells them there and on select dates at the Stonington Farmers Market.

“My husband asks me why I started this very complicated and labor-intensive frozen food chain,” Kung said with a laugh. “I’ve always dreamed of opening a dumpling business for 20 years. But it was always complicated. I thought about dumplings from all over the world. After 20 years of maturing and understanding that life is about simplicity, I decided to take this adventure.”

She’s taking it “little by little,” she says, and is making three different flavors. The ravioli fillings are inspired by Italy (pork and broccoli rabe), Mexico (chicken salsa verde) and Turkey (spiced squash with walnuts and currants).

The package contains six good-sized dumplings, which retail for $13.98. Their weight varies depending on the variety, but Kung said they weigh between 43 and 44 grams each. That’s nearly double the weight of an average dumpling, which tends to be about 22 grams, she said.

The six dumplings are enough for a meal for one or as an appetizer for three. Kung noted that nine is a lucky number in Cantonese, and the homophone for nine means longevity. “Great for a new business,” she said. And eight means prosperity.

Ingredients are sourced from local farms that raise their livestock without hormones or steroids. The dumplings contain no additives, preservatives or MSG. Kung makes the dough from scratch using premium, non-GMO King Arthur organic flour.

Kung said, “The way I make my dumplings is almost like a restaurant-quality dish, but stuffed into a dumpling. So it’s a little more complicated, the ingredients that go into it, than the regular dumplings that you buy at a grocery store or a Chinese or Japanese restaurant. My dumplings are created to be very juicy on the inside and have all the flavor in there, so you don’t have to dip them in a sauce.”

Personally, she doesn’t like to dip dumplings in sauce, because she thinks the sauce tends to overpower the flavor of the dumplings. But if people want to dip them, Kung offers some recommendations on her website (morseldumplings.com) for what to use with each of her three dumpling flavors. For pork and broccoli rabe, for example, she says a chimichurri sauce would be perfect.

Communicating through food

Kung and her husband bought a house in Stonington Borough in 2017. He used to sail in the area and knew it well. When they were dating, they often came to the area.

They still have a place in New York today, as he is the general director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art building.

Growing up in Stamford after her family emigrated from Hong Kong, Kung lived with her two grandmothers, “a traditional Asian and Chinese extended family,” she says. One of her grandmothers used to make dumplings. They couldn’t converse much because, Kung says, her grandmother “spoke a completely different dialect of Chinese, as different as Greek and English, so our way of communicating was through food.”

She fondly remembers sitting with her siblings and grandmother and making stuffed dumplings, various buns and other packaged foods, with their grandmother showing them how to do it.

Kung, 54, has loved cooking ever since. She co-founded a cooking club in New York, which she joined for more than a decade. And now, for example, if she throws a New Year’s Eve party, the menu will be five courses and lots of choices.

“It’s my passion. I love cooking to bring people together, to give them food, and that’s where I find a creative outlet. That’s where I’m the calmest,” she said.

“When I wrap ravioli, it’s almost meditative. It’s the same movement over and over again. I find myself in a zone. My mind clears.”

In a recent morning interview, she said she stayed at Fresh Harvest Kitchen until 2 a.m. making ravioli the night before. She has her day job and wants to spend time with her husband, so she’s trying to balance it all.

For about 22 years, she has worked for an advertising agency specializing in pharmaceutical marketing. She has reached a high level and, although she says it is very rewarding, it requires work weeks of 60 to 70 hours. Being laid off was a strong signal for her. Although she continues to work freelance, she also really enjoys making dumplings.

“I love making things with my hands and seeing the immediate gratification on people’s faces when they say, ‘Oh my God, I love this.’ A lot of what I did in my last job, you don’t see the results until two or three years later, in the long term, because I’m on the strategy side. It’s immediate. It’s so rewarding,” she said.

It’s his “side hustle” for now.

Kung noted that she had no experience in the food industry, but she had taken training to educate herself. In 2023, she took a three-month course in food product development at Cornell University’s e-Cornell. She did a four-day stager (i.e., unpaid internship) at Scoundrel, a French restaurant in Greenville, South Carolina, that was a 2024 James Beard Award semifinalist. And she was part of the March 2024 cohort that participated in the Food Business Accelerator CitySeed and Collab, a statewide accelerator for early-stage food entrepreneurs in Connecticut.

For now, Kung doesn’t have a wholesale license; she wants to see what the demand is first and sell directly to people.

And if this trio of offerings proves successful, Kung would love to create new flavors and talk about the possibilities of meatball fillings inspired by Greece and France.

“It’s traveling the world,” she said. “I love traveling…and the connection with people is through food.”

Where to find them

Fresh Harvest Cuisine

9 East Avenue, Westerly

Tuesday through Thursday and every Saturday, Kung is at the Stonington Farmers Market; check out his website at morseldumplings.com

Stonington Farmers Market

Velvet Mill Parking Lot, 22 Bayview Ave., Stonington

9am-12pm on July 13, August 3 and September 7

Stonington Borough Art Walk

10am-4pm September 14