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.
This isn’t cole slaw. It is a cabbage salad. It was John’s favorite part of the meal. He said it was the only part of the meal he didn’t think he’d get sick of eating as leftovers. I thought that perhaps the onion rings were a little much. I am not sure if I would’ve preferred them to be thinner slices or chopped more, but they were too much.
I, stupidly, didn’t start the recipe until much later than I should’ve because I was baking something else that I had started too late. The oven was set at 375 for that and I forgot to turn it up to 400 which I didn’t realize until the end of the cooking time. It might’ve cost me a bit on the browning of the meatballs, but they were still cooked through. I ended up getting supper on the table and had just enough time to eat before I sent John off to a Euchre tournament at the coffeehouse. You know, like everyone does. I figured it might be a good way to start meeting people in town. John likes Euchre.
Reading the recipe, I got the idea that it was pie crust with choux pastry spread on top. You have eaten choux pastry as a cream puffs or eclairs. It’s rich and eggy and if you don’t let the steam out, it deflates and gets sort of creamy inside. That was exactly what it was. There was nothing sweet about the pie crust or the choux, just richness, a bit of crisp, the almond flavor. The sweetness came in from the glaze poured all over the top.
