Do you remember chop suey?

 

Christian's so good chop suey--er, stir fry

I have no idea what made me think of chop suey lately, but that dish—the only Chinese fare we knew when I was a child in the Fifties—lodged itself in the memory section of my brain. As I’ve said probably too often, I grew up in a household of British food, the tone set by my dad and willingly followed by my mom. She cooked roast beef and leg of lamb, with potatoes and green salad. We ate on white linen, with linen napkins and napkin rings to save them from one use to another. Clearly, we did not eat chop suey out of those little white cartons that it came in, and I know we never went to the restaurants with chrome tables and Formica tops. And yet I remember it clearly. Perhaps my mom served it when Dad was out of town or some such—that sounds just like her. She liked to experiment; Dad did not much like experiments, though he was usually gracious about it.

So I did a little research. Wikipedia describes it as American Chinese cuisine—which says to me it’s not authentic Asian. Meat—beef, chicken, shrimp, what have you—with assorted vegetables, all cooked quickly and served over rice. Tales of its origins abound, from Chinese workers on the transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century to a Chinese restaurant, ready to close for the evening, where it was concocted out of leftovers. One story if that a Chinese cook was forced to serve drunken miners and threw it together to avoid a beating. Whatever its origins, it’s probably not from China and not a high-class meal.

Today you can still buy canned chop suey, principally under the La Choy label. But even on the picture on the can, the vegetables look soggy and tired. Then I began to look at recipes online, and the conclusion I finally reached is that the chop suey of my childhood is today’s stir-fry.

So tonight we had chop suey/stir fry. Christian is in his element cooking Asian foods, and he was looking forward to this, even though it required a grocery trip to find oyster sauce—Central Market didn’t have it, and he went all the way to Whole Foods in Waterside. Christian said the hardest thing about it was chopping—carrots, onion, celery, bok choy, water chestnuts, bamboo, a few mushrooms, some snow peas. I’m sure I’m forgetting something, because it was vegetable heavy. And delicious.

It was the chop suey I remember from childhood—looked, smelled, and tasted like it. I’m sure, however, what I remembered did not have all the fresh vegetables this one did. The only thing we forgot—the chow mein noodles I had stashed in my pantry drawer. Oh well, we can use them another time—they are even good on a tossed salad in place of croutons.

I am so grateful to Christian for indulging my memory. And glad it turned out to be a delicious—what if we had all thought it mediocre?

So after dinner I tried to send an email message to someone, only to find out Outlook required my password. Out of the blue! It wasn’t time to change it or anything, but suddenly no messages would go out. Of course, when I entered my password, the system rejected it. Has it ever worked any other way?

My email is through TCU, so I went through the automatic password change procedure, which is designed, I am sure, to drive you to screaming, hair-pulling lunacy. It rejected every combination I tried, telling me that was a word in the dictionary. Well, I hadn’t read carefully—it doesn’t say it must be a dictionary word, it says it cannot be. What the you know what? I have always used grandchildren’s names or words that meant something to me, so that I could remember them, even in combination with the required capitalization, numbers, and symbols. Now I was reduced to random letters—clearly frustrating. I’m sure I tried ten or twelve times before I finally got the blessed message: password updated.

And then, when I sent the picture of dinner from my phone to my computer, auto-correct changed it to chop duet!

So now, fed, happy, and password updated, I am ready to take on the new week. How about you?