Text 28980, 106 rader
Skriven 2015-07-13 08:53:00 av Michael Loo (1:18/200)
Ärende: chinese adventures 958
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So my friend Link and I were attending this wedding, and
on the way to the Doubletree in Leominster, Mass., we
decided we were hungry. I went to CVS to pick up an
emergency scrip, and the friendly pharm tech suggested
a Panera in town, but noticing our lengthening faces
noted that there was a Brazilian restaurant next door to
it, so we headed off in that direction, to find neither
at the end of where she had indicated they would be. So
Garmin to the rescue, but it brought up neither, so we
just went to the center of town, where our assistant told
us there were a couple diners and a Chinese restaurant
called Jade II (pronounced Jade eye eye). We parked at a
meter by the common and noticed a street fair, which I
led the way to in an excited way, only to find that the
only food available was from a hot dog truck. I was
perfectly fine with that, especially as the dogs ran about
$3 each and a barbecue sandwich $4, but Link wasn't
interested. We wandered town a little and found a diner
(closed) and a bar (bad idea) and eventually a strip-mall
storefront labeled Jade II. We poked in there and found
a teenager behind the register, a couple tables, and a
disreputable-looking Asian guy out back in what appeared
to be a spotless kitchen. The kid looked so expectantly
at us that that tipped the balance and we decided to eat
there. Got a Barq's for me and a Dasani for her from the
soda case on the wall and, it transpiring that there was
no tofu (my great white hope) on the menu, ordered the
#22 and #24a extra spicy. These were: pork lo mein with two
chicken wings and General Tso's chicken with boneless ribs
on fried rice. I've gotten sort of used to this kind of food
in airports, where the Manchu Wok and the Panda Express
reign, and maybe I had some kind of excuse in that we were
in a podunk town in 90F heat with the only other obvious
alternative being a hot dog truck, but this was a fairly
divergent thing for me.

The lo mein were pretty good, and Link wolfed the wings
down without giving me even a taste.

The fried rice was excellent. Pretty much the standard
recipe, but the rice was of perfect texture, there were
little chunks of pork fat and onions in it, and the
whole was salty but not too salty. The boneless ribs
were red-sugar-roasted sheets of pigmeat of unknowable
origin (I think diaphragm, actually); the first piece I
got was very fatty; the other 4 quite lean, sad to relate.
Decent flavor, only a bit too sweet, about 3/4 ounce each.
That would have sufficed for lunch, but there was more.

It is hard for me to put together words to describe how
appalling a thing is General Tso's chicken. I've described
what has been represented to me as the real thing - chunked
or shredded chicken lightly tossed with water chestnut flour
(more likely cornstarch) and stir-fried briefly, sauced with
a light and extremely spicy liquid that is mostly hot oil,
served over or next to watercress. I haven't had this for
over 30 years. What it's come to mean: deep-fried battered
bits of mystery meat with broccoli (the ratio depends on
whether broccoli or mystery meat is cheaper at the moment)
in a thick sweet soy-based goo. This time: 12 oz of food
including 4 or 5 broccoli florets (pretty good) and lots of
fried things in a translucent yellowish sweet-sour sauce
into which had been dumped at least two tablespoons of
crushed Italian hot pepper. The sauce got cloying quickly,
and I reflected that if I'd ordered the dish without sauce,
that would have been a substantial improvement. The sweetness
was such that Barq's could not stand up to it, and I had to
steal some Dasani water from Link lest I parch. I ended up
picking out first the "chicken" and then the bits of hot
pepper, which were quite hot and reasonably pepper-tasting.
A word about the fried stuff. Firstoff, when you chewed on
a piece, you either got a hard crust surrounding a nice soft
bit of protein, which was fine, or a hard crust followed by
more hard crust with some fibers inside that were reminiscent
of very overdone white meat but that on inspection didn't
resemble animal protein at all - I would not have been
surprised were I told that they were feathers or Kleenex even.
The overall texture of these pieces was not unpleasant, but on
balance I'd say that whoever invented McNuggets has met his
Chinese match in the synthetic meat arena.

That bottle of Barq's, as it turns out, carried 270 Calories
mostly in the form of 74 grams of sugar. Along with the 35 mg
of caffeine, a feast fit for a hyperactive kindergartner.

I won't say that the meal was bad; in fact, there were some
really good things about it, mostly the starch, and it provided
ample fuel for a wander about town and a wedding for afters.

On the way back to the car we noticed the town band (Leominster
Colonial Band) warming up under a tent. I poked my nose in to
see if there was anyone out here in the boonies whom I knew.
Surprise: I'd gone on tour with one of the horn players thirty
years ago, and we've seen each other periodically but not for
the last five or so; and the first trombone used to be chief
stagehand at Jordan Hall back when I hung around that place
(I was never a student there, but people thought I was, forty
years ago). I was warned that the piece de resistance at this
concert was going to be the 1812 Overture, so we stayed for the
first couple numbers and skeedaddled long before having to
resist that piece. Turned out that the occasion was the
centennial of the city's having become a city, after 275
previous years of townhood.
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