Sunday, October 28, 2012.
Two Perfect Storms. A Chinese Family Day.
Hurricane Sandy is moving in on the New York-Washington coast. It's a Category 2, which is bad enough. But from out of the west also approaches a big winter storm. It will merge with Sandy to become a rare hurricane blizzard. It looks pretty bad for our friends in the Northeast.
Much less worrisome except to me are my computer problems. Little did I know that they are also tied in with Hurricane Sandy. NOMenu.com is performing sluggishly or not at all. And what it puts out is messed up in unique ways. A call to the web hosting service told me that the problems are with them. In the Northeast. And that their remediating work is being complicated by the approach of Hurricane Sandy. This is not my weekend.
Jude leaves for L.A. tomorrow, so we must indulge in as many family activities as we can today. Trey Yuen emerged as the dinner venue. It has been awhile since the temple of Chinese food in Mandeville has been on our A-list, but that has nothing to do with the goodness of the food. We just got out of the habit, is all. And it's a forty-five-minute round trip from home.
The very fact that we haven't been there lately made it a source of nostalgia. The Wong brothers remember how Jude used to eat three or four orders of pot stickers at a sitting. That was when he was seven or eight years old. Just recalling that sends a tickle down our spines.
We began with the fried dumplings, of course. Just one order--Jude had learned to like other things on the menu. Fried won tons came too; Mary Leigh likes to scoop up fried rice with them. An order of egg rolls was somebody's request, so we had to discuss the distinctions between egg rolls and spring rolls. Both are fried, but the wrappers and filings are different. We can never remember which of them we like better. We flipped a coin and went for the egg rolls.
Wrapping up the appetizers was a bowl of hot and sour soup--an automatic order for me. Everything tasted the same as it did in our younger years. A good thing.
Now came flaming chicken for Jude. I've had this before, and I don't remember that they use 151-proof rum to flame the stir-fried chicken and its vegetables. Not a good idea, told the waiter. He was an older man who did nothing else for our table. Maybe he's the flaming-chicken specialist. He seemed to know what he was doing. In any case, the dish was very good.
For me, moo-shu vegetables, one of my favorite dishes at Trey Yuen. I actually like it better than the classic pork version of the dish, in which you more or less make your own Chinese burritos.
There was an unusual vegetable in the mix: thinly-sliced lotus root. (You can see it on the lower left side of the pile in the photo.) I've seen this before, usually in flower arrangements. Tommy Wong came out to say hello, and to explain what the lotus root was in there for. "It's a rare vegetable to find fresh," he said. "It's a floating plant, and the big root has pockets of air in it that keep the leaves above water." I found it had an interesting musky flavor. Almost sexual. Mary Ann didn't like it at all.
Home to watch the Saints game. I would have joined the seventy-five percent of the family if I didn't have this computer nightmare to deal with. I passed through the room now and then to make my presence felt. Mary Ann is happy, but her spirits are dropping, as the last hours of Jude's visit pass. He will not be home for Thanksgiving, he has said. He'll be with his girlfriend's family in Los Angeles. We'll make up for it with something big during the Christmas holidays.
I invited him to join me at Manresa. I knew well that he couldn't fit that into his schedule. But there's probably no room for him at the Jesuit retreat house, anyway. Someday I hope he comes with me.
Trey Yuen. Mandeville: 600 Causeway Blvd. 985-626-4476.
