Armchair adventures in less-than-extreme cuisine

[muckefuck]

Saturday night we visited Nuphy, fresh from his laparoscopic surgery. I was out gallivanting with Nibadi and didn't make it there until 5:30. Monshu was just stepping outside for a smoke and I went right up to the living room where ottr4bear and Rubeus were chatting with Nuphy. The old bear had something of the autumnal air of a patriarch to him, relaxing as he was in large recliner in nightshirt, robe, and two blankies.

We needed to order food and Nuphy said he was curious about this Chinese delivery menu that he'd gotten. (I can hear the sighs of relief from rollick, among others--finally! He is going to talk about food!) He thought it'd be of special interest to me because one side was completely in Chinese. On that score, he was totally correct. I compared the Chinese menu to the English and here are the differences I noted:

• The seafood section was three or four times larger.
• There were no appetisers listed.
• Entrees had only a single price and it was equal to or lower than the lower of two prices for each entree on the English menu.
• There were no symbols indicating spiciness.
• There were organs. I can't tell you exactly which organs, since I haven't learned the characters for them all, but I do know the "flesh" radical when I see it and it usually denotes organs.
• The fried rices and chow meins had intriguing names as opposed to being identified simply by choice of meat.

I chose an interesting-looking chow mein, Yangzhou dry [something] beef, and passed the menu around. Since my selection was only on the Chinese menu, I decided to try ordering all the dishes off of there. Would the portions really be smaller, as Rubeus was warning? I had to find out.

I asked the operator if I could give her numbers instead of names. She hesitated, then said okay. I gave her the number for chénpí jī (orange chicken) and she said, "From the Chinese menu?" with a slight querying lilt. I felt like my little ruse had been discovered. "Um...yeah. The next one's also from there" and I gave a number and attempted to say "sesame chicken" in Cantonese, but she cut me off. I got the message: Please don't murder my language; listen how kind I'm being to yours! At the end, she said something about soup, which I hadn't ordered or intended to. When I queried her, she said, "When you order off the Chinese menu, you get soup. Is that alright?" Twist this roundeye's arm!

I wish I could say it was all fantastic, but...well...it was typical Cantonese delivery food. Monshu held his tongue until after we'd left and then let loose his condemnation. The further we were from Nuphy's, the worst he deemed it. At first it was "nothing special", but by the time we were at his door it was "really bad". I humbly think that the chow mein was the most interesting dish. The beef was tender and spicy--I think the character for "dry" might've been refering to a dry rub of some kind. (The worst was probably the bloated crabless crab rangoon.) The soup was...odd. Large serrated leaves gave it a slightly sour taste--a bit like sorrel soup, but not so intense. I drank half a bowl and no one else touched it, but Nuphy was subsisting off of broth alone, so I wonder if he hasn't downed some by now.

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