My First Chow Mein Christmas

To carry on in the vein of non-traditional traditions I seem to have acquired this year I was invited to spend Christmas with the Cute Gardener and his family for seafood and chow mein dinner.

Christmas dinner for me has always meant turkey. While growing up, the holiday morn meant waking up early to the smells already wafting in from the kitchen as mom cooked a trough of stuffing for the basted bird that would soon go into the oven. The family would converge in the living room around the tree with a big black garbage bag for discarded gift wrap and we would gorge on trays of brie en croute, goose liver pate and my mom’s famous white trash dip alongside cracker bread from San Francisco and miniature pumpernickel and rye bread slices while opening our stockings stuffed with treats. Throughout the day guests would arrive as my mother always claimed the day for all our orphan friends who had nowhere else to go. Hot toddies and white Russians would be poured long into the evening and clean up would be saved for the following day when we would scour the pots for leftover food and slices of pecan and pumpkin pie. As an adult, I continued on with the turkey to feed my own orphans but developed my own recipes for things like my famous (and constantly requested even from other people for dinner at their own houses) sausage and sage stuffing and tarragon green beans.

But this year it all started for me at Santa Monica Seafood, which became a strange Dickensian scene of mass people gathered around the fish monger deli counter five deep waving their hands in the air as their numbers were called in a frantic symphony of buyers and sellers of fruits of the sea. We danced around the crush of bodies, weaving in and out to choose salmon and crab and other tantalizing things to eat.

Later on our holiday destination, I watched as the CG prepared chow mein, something I have never participated in but have always been strangely fascinated by. For, like the CG says, “Chow mein is an odd meal in that you take a dry noodle and make it wet only to make it dry again and then make it wet again before it even reaches the dinner plate.”

In laymen’s terms this meant watching him first boil the special chow mein noodles in a large pot.

Then he painstakingly fried handful batches of the cooked noodles and then put them aside.

Next he stir fried cubes of tender pork that had been marinating in dark mushroom soy sauce all morning.

Then, he prepared vegetables: carrots, yellow bell pepper, mushrooms, and bok choy for the wok, cutting them all into roughly the same ratio of julienned strips. This was all stir fried together in a strategic order before a dousing of chicken broth, corn starch and oyster sauce that married all of the flavors together.

The noodles were then added and everything was tossed and plated along with the body, legs and head of this shell-y beast. 

I had the pleasure of cooking the salmon, simply baked, lain with thin, whole rounds of lemon slices under a sprinkling of fresh chopped parsley.

Although I am typically a red wine drinker, I find that it's really hard to find a libation that goes with Chinese food. Although, for this meal we found the perfect accompaniment in a Corpse Reviver cocktail that consists of gin, Lillet Blanc, lime juice, Cointreau and absinthe. 

I have never really cared for chow mein in Chinese restaurants because it tends to be oily, mushy and fat-ridden – not worth the calories. But after having this version, I am now an ardent fan and even may try to copy it in my own kitchen experimenting with the types of veggies, meat and sauces.

I also didn’t mind being the orphan for a change!

Festa Dei Cinque Pesci Birthday

The Italians have a Christmas tradition called Festa dei Sette Pesci in which they serve seven different kinds of fish including salt cod and smelt and join together with family to celebrate the holiday season. Yesterday, I took part in an adapted version minus two fish for the Cute Gardener’s birthday. 

Because we are such avid foodies and eat out all the time, it’s just not the same to think about birthdays in terms of a fancy meal out at an expensive restaurant so instead, when it comes to celebratory occasions we do a reverse ritual of making the days special with creative food sojourns of our own. For New Year’s, this meant caviar tasting at home; for Valentine’s Day I made homemade ravioli; and for the Fourth of July we spent time in San Francisco whirling through an Asian extravaganza.

I am pretty sure that the Cute Gardener would choose crab as one of the elements in his last meal alive if it was something he was able to plan ahead so I called the Santa Monica Seafood Market and Café to make sure they were stocked on fresh Dungeness before we made our way there. With crab as the centerpiece of the day’s wish list, I knew everything else could go a little more organically.

We started out at the Café for lunch to eat down and dirty comfort-food-on-a-cold-beach-day traditions like fish and chips fried to a fluffy pillow of perfection and a buttery, lemon aioli-dressed lobster roll in baskets full of perfectly cooked fries. I soaked mine in malt vinegar and enjoyed memories of the East Coast when I had first discovered a love of the classic Maine-style frites.

After lunch, we grabbed more food from the fresh, deli case and headed home for a disco nap before a gluttonous seafood dinner. 

We bought a dozen Pacific oysters for $1.50 a pop and prepped them on ice in my fridge. There was something extremely satisfying about shucking them and presenting them as a gift to my man. Six of them were scintillatingly salty and crispy, brine-tinged Malpeques while the other six were large and meaty, black and smoky Fanny Bays in the most gorgeous gradients-of-green, lotus blossom layered shells.

Next the CG sashimi-sliced a dark slab of opah moonfish to clean the palate before our main course. We ate the raw delight with small dabs of salt and black olive tapenade, which made a surprisingly good bite on the tongue.

Although I shucked the oysters, I left the crab discombobulation to the pro.

This in particular is one of those funky things the CG likes to eat and specifically asked the fish monger at the mart to leave on and un-cleaned – the head. I tried a spoonful of the mustard yellow, mushy stuff he pulled out from its ethers and gladly handed over the rest of the delicacy to him as a birthday gift. I actually got pleasure off watching him enjoy it though, unlike the gelatinous eyeball I saw him once slurp off a red fish at a Chinese restaurant.

We proceeded to eat the rest of the crab meat alongside a nice pile of angel hair pomodoro.

To top of the festa, we enjoyed my homemade almond lace cookies with Satsuma tangerines from his garden, a pile of LEGO and old black and white movies. Traditions are best when made fresh and unique by the participants involved!