Chinese Food For American New Year

About author / Sarah Christine Bolton

Coffee addict; professional food writer; food fusion. Her slow cooker recipes go above and beyond your normal crockpot fare.

I had an opportunity to visit Washington D.C. recently. It was my first visit ever, so I was overwhelmed by everything: the monuments, the museums, and the traffic. I only had one day in the city, so my friend and I walked all day to try and take in everything. Our only break was in Chinatown…for food, of course! After walking up and down several streets and alleyways, we found the least sketchy-looking establishment and climbed the narrow stairs to the second floor.

Inside, the waitress showed us to our seats.

“Is it feel hot in here?” she asked us, handing us soup splattered menus. We shook our heads no.

“Okay, well, air conditioning working only half way,” she explained. We shrugged and smiled and ordered.

Our food came rather quickly, and we dug in. We had taken about two bites when one of the waiters came up to our table.

“In thirty minutes, all power gone,” he said. “They will fix air conditioning but all power gone. You must go quickly.”

My friend and I nodded and started eating faster. Then, the same waiter came back with to-go boxes and shoveled our food into them. In shock, my friend and I paid our bill and left.

All in all, I think we were in the restaurant for 20 minutes. The food was good…it would have been nice to have a little bit more of it! We made up for it by stopping at the Chinatown Starbucks. Caffeine has a way of making everything better!

My earliest introduction to Chinese food was when my mom would make egg foo yung and chicken chow mein on New Year’s Eve. Along with watching old movie marathons, banging pots and pans at midnight, and drinking hot chocolate, we almost always had Chinese food for a late-night dinner on New Year’s Eve. My experience in the D.C. Chinatown brought back the memory of those nights, so I e-mailed my mom to ask her about it.

She told me that when she was growing up, her father’s father (she called him Grandpa Terry) used to cook egg foo yung on New Year’s Eve. Since it had been a while since she had made it, she didn’t remember all the ingredients, but said she thought it had egg, bean sprouts, onion, celery, and maybe water chestnuts. She said he mixed everything up with salt and pepper, cooked it like a hotcake in a frying pan and served it with soy sauce. I CDK'd the recipe and confirmed her version. She was right on.

During the 19th century, many restaurant chefs (especially in the west) began to incorporate Chinese dishes into their menus, mostly because of the large number of Chinese railroad workers in the area. Some of the chefs actually invented well-known American-Chinese dishes, including chop suey and General Tso’s chicken, while others simply took traditional Chinese dishes and adapted them to American tastes.

I decided to give chicken chow mein a try. I wished my mom could have been here to guide me step-by-step, but she was 2,000 miles away, so I was all on my own. I mixed everything together, painstakingly cooked in the pan (freaking out that it was getting too hard or not hard enough) and served it with lots of soy sauce (just in case it didn’t taste good).

I’ll just say this about it. Usually, whenever I cook something, I’m analyzing it as I eat it. “Needs a bit more salt,” I’ll say. Or, “I shouldn’t have cooked it this long.” With this recipe, I was silent. It was so good, all I could do was eat, chew, eat, chew. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but dang, it was tasty!

Serves/Makes: 6

• 1 tablespoon oil
• 1 1/2 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut in 1-inch pieces
• 4 carrots, peeled and thinly sliced
• 4 green onions, white and green parts sliced
• 3 stalks celery, sliced
• 1 cup low-sodium chicken broth
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1/3 cup light soy sauce
• 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 4 ounces sliced water chestnuts
• 8 ounces bean sprouts
• 1/4 cup cornstarch
• 1/2 cup water