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?
