Impromtu Chinese

Friend: I'm feeling kinda blue. I really need to get out of the house.

Me: I'm home all day. We should hang out.

Friend: Sounds great. We should make chinese.

Me: Awesome! See you at 3:00.

Seriously, that's how this plan started. We got together and looked through my pantry and fridge and decided to make Vietnamese Summer Rolls, Lo Mein, Pork Lettuce Wraps, Steamed Dumplings, and Rice. I do not recommend making this type of decision in the late afternoon. We made a quick trip to the grocery store, which turned into two grocery stores because we couldn't find refrigerated chinese noodles and really thin Ginger Snaps at the first store.

Now it's 5:30. We started the prep work for our summer rolls, which is pretty easy, you just have to cut all the vegies into tiny strips. We made vegetarian rolls with carrots, cucumber, avacado and basil (from the garden) and shrimp rolls with shrimp, carrot, chives (from the garden) and cilantro. It took a couple times but we got the hang of rolling them up neatly and only destroyed two sheets of rice paper in the process.

Now it's 6:45. We made spicy hoisin and soy and garlic dipping sauces for the rolls. We taste tested the rolls and sauces with one of the less attractive rolls, toasted our efforts with an adult beverage and moved onto steamed dumplings.

The recipe called for tofu, but neither one of us care for fermented soy products, so we substituted a small amount of the ground pork we had thawed out for the lettuce wraps. (That's right, at 4:00 pm I took items out of the freezer for this adventure) We began assembling the dumplings when I noticed that we would have lots of wrappers left over and since I had crabmeat on hand, we whipped up crab and cream cheese stuffing for fried wontons.

Steamed Dumplings

We continued to prep the vegies and sauces for the pork wraps and lo mein, and by 8:30 we had everything pretty much ready to cook. At this point, I looked around for my dear husband, who is the wok master and could not find him. After I tracked him down on a neighbor's porch we were ready to stir-fry.

Spicy Pork Lettuce Wraps

Fried Wontons with Crab and Cream Cheese

Chicken Lo Mein

To get authentic stir fry flavor, we hook up the burner from the turkey fryer, and heat the wok up to a ridiculous temperature and cook everything very quickly. This eliminates the greasy texture that homemade Lo Mein has when I try to do it in a regular skillet on a standard burner.
Meanwhile we turned on the steamer and fried the wontons. It was about this time that I realized, we forgot to cook rice. We figured nobody would miss it. We were ready to sit down on the patio and enjoy a lovely chinese dinner at 9:30.

Yup, that's my husband sneaking a taste out of the bowl, with his fingers, before everyone else sits down.

Summer Rolls that we almost left in the fridge at dinner time.

As soon as I knew we were fixing dinner I decided to start something for dessert. I had fresh, ripe peaches in the fridge and made a quick ice cream custard and infused it with some ginger. I added pureed peaches and let it sit for a few hours. I didn't want the ginger to be overwhelming, and didn't add a lot. When we tasted the finished product before we went to the store, we both agreed the ginger didn't really pop. We served the ice cream with a couple tasty, thin ginger snaps and the meal was complete!

We had a late dinner, but really enjoyed spending a day in the kitchen. We each found our niche in the kitchen. We laughed at our mistakes. At the end of the day we were tired, but happy and stuffed.

The lo mein and pork wraps were outstanding, the steamed dumplings tasted great, but the wrappers were mushy. Next time we'll use the same filling but turn them into pot-stickers. You heard right... at 11:00 we were planning the next big feast