KUNG PAO FOR CHRISTMAS?

No, this is NOT a post about Chinese food for westerners. This blogger tends to avoid concoctions like kung pao and general Tso's. They just aren't done very well in most places, and they vary considerably from restaurant to restaurant. Chinese food for white people is best exemplified by canned chowmein and berserk culinary concepts.


Add a drizzle of soy to the meatloaf, and presto! Chinese!

Tuna salad with sesame-chili aioli? Presto, Chinese!

Turkey dogs, pineapple. Presto, Chinese!


This blogger is not even going to the 24th. annual Kung Pao Kosher Comedy event (the dinner show is already sold out in any case) at the New Asia Garden on Pacific Avenue just below Stockton Street. Eating quasi-Cantonese food with a whole bunch of vibrant single Jews?
None of whom I have ever met before the feast?
That is very much not my thing.

Yeah, I'm single, and have nothing else planned for Christmas day.

But I am neither Jewish nor quasi-Cantonese.

I wish them a lot of fun.

But no.


The most Chinese-y thing I will do that day is likely have some dimsum by myself, assuming that the point-and-order places I like are open, smoke a pipe while wandering around Chinatown for an hour, then hunt up some milk-tea and a piggy bun, enjoy another bowl afterwards, and head on home. Where I will roast the turducken my landlords gave us.

My apartment mate won't have any of the turducken till later, as she will dutifully treck over to a relative's house for the usual holiday dinner with family. Where, one presumes, there will be some Chinese food. Because they are all Cantonese.


Not a Caucasian, Jew, or Japanese person in the bunch.

It's rather sad. Caucasian folks are a lot of fun.

I've never cooked a turducken. I suspect it's nothing like a goose. That, at least, I know how to cook.
Duck too. I do a good bird.

Roast Goose would be wonderful, especially Hong Kong style, but the only place in Chinatown that does goose is not where I want to be on Christmas. Going there for goose by myself on Christmas would seem like failure, and might provoke feelings sympathy among the wait-staff (or glee from the waiter who actively dislikes me).
Which would be misplaced; I have no intention of being miserable like other bachelors that day.

Instead, I shall be perky and chipper. And full of good cheer. Precisely like a groundhog.

Yeah. A groundhog.

You betcha.







Dim sum. Chuchai bao. Naai cha. Turducken.

A tin of aged Virginia tobacco.

And twinkly eyes.

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