There are times where I fail at a meal completely. It doesn’t happen often, but it does occasionally happen. Since John can remember, there have been only handful of meals that we absolutely could not eat. This was one of them. It wasn’t something like that episode of Chopped where the contestant mistook salt for sugar. The dish didn’t burn. The eggs weren’t spoiled. It was nothing that I did wrong. It was the recipe. Maybe cooking Chinese food created by Iowa farmers with German heritage was a bad idea. Maybe my expectations were too high. I do remember thinking while looking at the ingredients “how bad can this be?”. 
We spent the meal creating alternative names for this dish. Egg Foo Yuck, Egg Foo Old, Egg What the F!&@. It was horrible. It tasted like the Rock River smelled a few years ago when the carp all got herpes and died. The river was a stream of dead fish, the fish got caught up in the trees on the side of the river. The smell was horrific.
The Egg Foo Yung was horror movie worthy. It was like dirty socks mixed with dead fish. The texture was silken tofu-y.
It was like something that Gordon Ramsey pulls out of a drain on one of those episodes of Kitchen Nightmares. You know what I’m talking about.
In case you are wondering, cans of chop suey vegetables are really just cans of bean shoots with 3 pieces of carrot and one piece of celery. It is gross on so many levels. It looks disgusting, it smells disgusting, there is nothing good I can say about it. I’m hoping to not find more recipes that call for this ingredient.
Canned shrimp is probably fine in other uses, but even so it didn’t ruin the dish any worse than anything else. I really can’t think of much that would make this dish worse except a can of tuna…and serving it with soy sauce like the recipe suggested. Don’t do that. It makes it worse. 
If you have decided that my description is not scary enough and you are going to insist on making this, it probably takes 20 minutes on low and covered to set the egg, but please, do not make it. You will regret wasting the ingredients, you will think of all the delicious things you could’ve made with those eggs.
Thank goodness this was not the only thing we had for dinner. The roasted beets with blueberry vanilla goat cheese and the zucchini and tomatoes cooked with Penzey’s Fox Point Seasoning were delicious. And the other dish I made to go with it was something I thought was called Japanese Chicken, but that’s the next post.
If I hadn’t eaten it already, and knew how horrid it was, I’d read this column as a challenge…
What did you do with the other half of the can of chop suey veg?
I cheated and used the whole thing, but I’m sure that wasn’t the issue. My thought was exactly “what am I going to do with the other half?”