Monday, October 6, 2025

Cooking Chinese (Again)

I took a break last week to cook some food for friends before they went off on tour of Europe. I was feeling nostalgic for some Chinese, and I had some scallops and crabs in the freezer I wanted to use up, having long ago bought them in anticipation of such an occasion. I can't claim the food was really remarkable, but it hit the spot. And the process is fascinating enough I thought it might be useful to write something about it. I also thought it was well nigh time to write something in Notes on Everyday Life that wasn't just about politics and the woes of capitalism. And what's more quotidian than cooking? (Even if this particular meal isn't just everyday fare.)

You can read the piece here: Cooking Chinese: "Let's take a break and cook up something tasty." Or you can also read it in my archive, but if you go read it at Substack, you'll show up in the statistics they send me, and that will make me feel a bit better. Even more gratifying would be a subscription. You might even pass links or copies on to your friends, and encourage them to subscribe. It's all free, and I expect to keep it that way. But it's not something I'm highly motivated to do while remaining totally oblivious to whether anyone reads it or not. Writing, like cooking, is something I do to share. And while I may do that for vain, selfish, and/or egotistical reasons, I do care how it is received.

On the other hand, since I have the plate picture handy, let's go ahead and include it here (cw from top: eggplant nuggets, soft shell crabs, baby bok-choy, peanut sauce noodles, scallops in not-so-spicy orange sauce, with some curried fried rice in the middle:

Like everything else these days, this piece took me much longer to write than I expected, or thought it should. So when I got it into what seemed like reasonable shape, I clicked on "publish" (or whatever it's called) before realizing that I had links in the file to several recipes that I hadn't uploaded yet. Then I figured I should also include a link in the notebook. Then it occurred to me to file this blog entry. It doesn't fit any of my regular series, but that's just as well. In order to publish a blog entry, I have to do a full website update, and that inhibits me from posting trivial blog entries. But since I have to do an update anyway, it's kind of liberating just to jot down a few afterthoughts. It's possible that my favorite form of writing is meta-commentary.

I always struggle to keep from going off on tangents, each an interesting story in its own right, but obstacles to getting to any sort of point. I imagine that when I get my memoir directory set up, I can just dedicate a file to each and every thread, and explore them ad nauseum. For instance, I mention five (or six, if you count Claiborne, which I don't) cookbooks. I'd like to list all of my cookbooks, thumb through them, and note recipes I recall making, with whatever memories they evoke. This will include close to a dozen Chinese cookbooks, and a bit more than a dozen Indian, as well as 3-5 each from Japan, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia/Malaysia, Myanmar, and Iran, as well as a few regional surveys (my sources for dishes from the Philippines, Afghanistan, and Indochina -- I've been remiss on Vietnam, especially given that I regularly shop in Vietnamese grocers, but I've never been very happy with local Vietnamese restaurants, which we have quite a few of).

Similarly, I'd like to build a fairly detailed log of birthday (and other major) dinners. The memoir will explain how these came about, and evolved over the years. For now, let's just say that they started around 1995, after I left Contex -- although they probably overlap time I did consulting for Xyvision -- and they arose from socializing with friends who worked there. The first two were Chinese. If memory serves, one had 18 dishes, the other 22. The third was Indian. In 1998, we moved to New Jersey, and I did Indian again, this time inviting friends out from New York City. That one I remember as the most spectacular one ever. Or maybe I just felt challenged by the guests, who had a lot of experience with the cuisine. Or maybe there was a Turkish menu in that series, perhaps between the two Indians. There was a Turkish restaurant in Brookline we loved, and I made a lot of Turkish food before NJ.

In 1999, we moved to Wichita. I don't recall making birthday dinner that year: seems like I prepped a "beer butt chicken" for my brother's grill one year, but that hardly counted. I do recall skipping one other year later. A friend had moved to Salina, so we drove up there and went to Brookville Hotel for fried chicken. But we've generally done something every year. One of the most modest was a single Brazilian feijoada. Spanish, Thai, Moroccan, Cuban, Russian, Greek, Korean, and French were major productions. I've made a lot of Italian, Japanese, Ashkenazi, and Middle Eastern (in which I include Israel, even an "Eretz Israel" cake attributed to Ariel Sharon's wife), as well as substantial menus from Mexico, Iran, and Hungary, but I don't think they landed on my birthday. One year when I was down in the dumps, a friend talked me into just grilling hamburgers. (We had several meats, homemade buns, potato salad, baked beans, slaw, and my mother's legendary coconut cake.) Another year I just dug into the "soul food" cookbooks. For 2020, with the pandemic in full swing, we ate in the backyard: Turkish yogurtlu kebap, Tunisian bisteeya, and various salads from Iran to Morocco, with two cakes: coconut again, and flourless chocolate.

This may sound like bragging, but I'm really just a rank amateur. I have no training, no restaurant experience, and I'm really quite inept at lots of things (especially bread). I have no sense of food as art, and never serve plated meals. Everything is "family style": pass it around and pick out what you want. That may go back to my childhood, when restaurants were road stops, never destinations. I was moderately picky then, but I always was interested in trying something exotic. I remember jumping at my first opportunity to order veal (in Pocatello). I don't remember what it tasted like (which was probably nothing). Much of what I remember about going out into the world was tied to food.

I allude to various food stories in the piece, but always had to steer the piece back on course. The first "Chinese" food I ate was actually a bit earlier. My aunt found a "chop suey" kit and wanted to serve us Chinese. It wasn't very good. (Mostly the kit's fault, I'm sure, but she almost never cooked for us, and was the only female in my mother's family who wasn't famed as a cook.) It was another decade before my parents finally went to a proper Chinese restaurant. My father's cousin, from Dodge City, came to town and wanted to try the Chinese. We went to Albert's, and spent an hour in line waiting for a table. My father was miserable, but my mother was delighted not to have to cook, and by then I had a fair idea what to look for. After my mother died, the first thing we did was to drive out to Dodge City, where I made my mother's last birthday dinner for the cousin, who hadn't been able to join us for the funeral. After that, we drove on to Phoenix, where my mother's last sister lived. I don't think I cooked for her then, but we did hit up a Chinese restaurant at some point. (I also remember Mexican.)

Aside from my fellow Boy Scout, there was another Chinese family in our neighborhood -- they also owned a Chinese restaurant, although I wasn't aware of it at the time -- and they had a daughter who was in my grades 1-6. She was the smartest person I knew back then, which may help explain why I never bought in to the notion of white male superiority. She had the advantage of having been held back a year, because English was her second language, but I still remember an embarrassing incident in 2nd grade where she clearly understood the language a lot better than I did. Good chance she was taller than me, too.

I did finally mention my mother's last birthday dinner, but there are many other stories I can recall about cooking for her. She may not have had any clue how to cook Chinese, or even what she was eating -- she was a seafood-phobe, but other than that was pretty much game for anything -- but her taste buds were primed for Chinese. Indeed, everyone's equipped to discern sweet, sour, salty, hot, and various aromatics. It's just that no other cuisine attacks your taste buds as systematically as Chinese. (Indian, with its wider array of spices, aims more for the nose.) She regularly declared things that I had cooked the best she's ever had. She even learned to cook a particularly easy but delicious dish: 1-2-3-4-5 Ribs.

Many more stories could be worked in. I recall making the scallops dish for my cousin-mentor at her home. I often took cookbooks (and sometimes supplies and knives) on long car trips, on the off chance that someone might ask me to cook something. (Last time I was in Buffalo, we chased down some veal scallopine and sauteed it with cream, wine and capers. One time in Idaho, we went to a remote mountain cabin, and cooked Turkish food on a campfire. Another cousin in Arkansas took a meal I cooked there and included it in a family cookbook.) My sister lived with us in New Jersey for several months when she was pregnant. That overlapped soft-shell crab season, which we made several times a week. I don't recall whether we used the Kuo recipe then, or I got into it later, but we did cook a lot of Chinese during those months. I remember a Szechuan duck that was even more work than the more famous Peking duck I made later.

I had the plate photo for the recent meal. I've been taking those fairly regularly, so I scanned through the archives looking for something else I could use. The "mise" photo is similar in scale to this particular meal, and give you a good idea of the level of complexity involved. It took me a while to figure out what the white-and-gold plate was between the eggplant and peas: salted duck egg, peeled and coarsely chopped, which went into the rice along with the peas, tofu, sausage, egg, zucchini, bacon, and shallots. (This time I omitted several of those, while adding a sauteed red bell pepper.) Since those pictures came roughly at the end, I thought I should include another picture near the top, which would be picked up in the PR. The 2020 plate was by far the most similar to this latest meal. The big difference is that it involves a fair amount of deep frying, which I probably haven't done since. (I had to look closely to find bits of spinach in the scallops. This time I just used a small saucepan with a half-inch of oil, but wound up with a lot more spinach, as is obvious.) What I have seems patchy, but there are many more images of interest. Again, something for the memoir pile.

I also wound up adding several files to the Recipes (new) directory. I figured the curious should be able to follow the links, without me having to clutter up the narrative too much. I set up the Recipes (old) directory in 2000, when I first transplanted my ocston website, but I've always been pretty erratic at updating it. (I don't know whether anyone else refers to it, but it's useful to me when I travel.) I redesigned it in 2007, but I've never been happy with it, and again have been pretty erratic at updating it. Like much else, it needs a redesign. I have more indexing information than I've wound up using. I should be able to search by ingredient, as well as source and cuisine. There is a dinner log feature, but I've rarely updated it: some meals are fully broken out (and include recipes I've never made again), but many more meals are missing. A couple items have pictures, but much more could be done there, just using the current photo archive.

One possible book project is to compile my mother's recipes, and augment them with a few of my own, woven together in some kind of memoir. Would be a good opportunity to collect family lore, although at this point most of that will be second-hand. While I have my mother's recipe files, the problem there is that very little of what she actually cooked ever got written down. (I have her chicken & dumplings because I asked for it long ago, but I only much later tried re-inventing her meatloaf, which has since evolved into my own distinct version.) On the other hand, much of what is in the files are recipes she cadged from others, as much from etiquette as genuine curiosity, as there are many she never made again, and look to be best forgotten.

My next bout of serious cooking is likely to be my birthday dinner in late October. I'm thinking about Indonesian this time. I've cooked a half-dozen recipes from the Indonesian section of The Complete Asian Cookbook, including the local variant of a fried rice pilaf, a chicken fried then simmered in brazil nuts and coconut milk, and the world's greatest peanut sauce. I also remember a tiny restaurant in Somerville (north of Boston, back in the 1990s) that served a huge rijsttafel for two, that consisted of 8-12 dishes: curries, salads, rice, fried bananas. That always seemed like something to explore in some depth. I cooked Burmese last year. As part of my research, I picked up a cookbook by James Oseland, Cradle of Flavor: Home Cooking From the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, but I never made anything from it. So just as last year's dinner was determined by the desire to open a previously unused cookbook, I took this as an omen that Indonesian should be next. Given the alternatives, this is the one thing I'm actually looking forward to thinking about.

One last thing to note here is that my Substack newsletter, Notes on Everyday Life, has been a pretty modest success so far. The day after posting, I got a statistics report showing 80 views, 4 likes, 0 comments, 0 new subscribers (66 total). September's stats were down from August, mostly because posts were down from 3 to 2 (but also the "30d open rate," whatever that means, is down 7.02%). I never set a schedule to work to, but I expected to get more out than I've been able to. But I am reasonably happy with the posts so far, especially as the extra time and care seems to read better. And I have lots of ideas in the pipeline -- although it's possible that Loose Tabs and Music Week are suffering as a result. But I'm more inclined to blame my shortcomings on a world that is failing us worse than even I could have imagined.

Music Week will be delayed a day, so Tuesday (and probably not early). Monday has been wiped out by home maintenance issues, which at the moment are too upsetting even to go into. I expect Tuesday will be unpleasant too, but I should have time for what is essentially a bookkeeping task.

Ask a question, or send a comment.