Most sane people keep a drawer full of delivery menus for the sole purpose of...ordering delivery. I too have a delivery menu drawer, but can count on two hands the number of times I have actually ordered delivery in the past few years.

Call me a bad New Yorker.  I'm pretty good with picking up takeout while out somewhere, but dialing from home is another story. Being so dangerously close to the kitchen, I usually wind up studying the menu for half an hour, choosing an entree, then deciding, screw this, I can make the same dish, except way better.

This hubris usually leads me to spend another couple of hours ransacking my cabinets, schlepping to the grocery store, figuring out a strategy, then executing it. Even if it is already past 9pm and I'm starving. Sure, it would have been easier and about 1 hour and 50 minutes faster to just call the damn Golden Panda Dynasty, but definitely not as satisfying. Or so I tell myself.

I wonder if delivery menu one-upmanship can be classified as a psychological disorder. 

Although I write a blog on Chinese cooking, every once in a while I get a craving for concoctions that are a far cry from what anyone in China would actually eat.

Take Mandarin Chicken Salad, for example, also called "Asian Chicken Salad", "Chinese Chicken Salad", or the very archaic "Oriental Chicken Salad". (Note to Applebee's: hire a menu consultant from the 21st century.) For one thing, the Chinese think of eating raw lettuce as barbaric. But whoever thought of this hodgepodge of ingredients also had a brilliant marketing mind.

The idea of such a salad was probably born out of Californian Pan-Asian cuisine in the 1980s (some say from Wolfgang Puck's kitchen), when it was cool to be fit and just a little bit worldly. You take a bunch of romaine, mix it with cold chicken breast, some type of orange, add a soy-ginger-peanut-buttery dressing, and top it off with crunchy La Choy chow mein noodles or something similar. Just healthy enough, just exotic enough. The soy sauce, sesame oil, and ginger are the only things Asian about such a salad, but the names seemed to have stuck. 

This past weekend, I saw the effects of the chicken wing shortage that was reported earlier this year.

I was all set to grill wings for a last-minute July 4th/Birthday gathering, but one look at the Trader Joe's meat department derailed my plans. Brooklyn Fare didn't have wings either. Or Associated Supermarket. Forget shrimp. Chicken wings may be this season's most sought-after commodity. 

What every store had, however, was plenty of chicken thighs. At ridiculously low prices. It'll set you back $1.99/lb for "natural, hormone-free" chicken, and just a bit more for the organic, free-range variety. Legs and thighs may be awkward to pass around while sipping a beer outdoors or pretending to care about the World Cup, but are perfect for a braising dish I like to make even in the summer. 

I posted a recipe last year for pork adobo. But it is the chicken version that I make again and again (and again and again.) I first learned to make this Filipino dish from an ex-roommate. Certain friends have gotten sick of it after the 20th time, so now I learn to space out my cooking of it. Instead of twice a week, I'll indulge in my craving twice a season.

I really have a love-hate relationship with Americanized Chinese food.

Most of the time, the food comes from forgettable joints that use the same plastic placards from the same 1980s catalog of florescent food photos. The gooey sauces, soggy bite-sized fried meat, and liberal use of MSG will remind me why I only eat that stuff once every six months. 

But then, there are moments that remind me why Chinese-American food has thrived for the last century. My nostalgic obsession with one kosher Chinese restaurant in Brookline, MA, has already been well documented on this blog. And there is, of course, the ease of eating.

I will probably take a lot of flack for saying this, but whatever: some days I just don't want to deal with bones. I just want to be lazy and eat my bite-sized chicken or pork or beef and not have to find a separate plate for inedibles. No matter how easy that plate may be to retrieve. The ingenuity of this hybrid cuisine is that it appeals to an American's innate laziness, even if that American happens to also write about and teach Chinese cooking. 

As much as i love to cook, I never have time to plan weekday lunches. After a frazzled morning at the desk, trying to get just one more bit of work done, I am ravenous by 1 or 2pm. My lame attempts at breakfast (usually Wheatables and fruit gummies) do not suffice.

I storm out of the building in a mad search for anything edible on the street. Unfortunately, other than mediocre $10 sandwiches and faux-Mexican, there is nothing except Safeway and Whole Foods. So I go for supermarket soup. Soup is filling. Soup is warming. Soup is cheap (well, not at Whole Foods). But sooner or later, you get sick of Chunky Chicken Noodle and Spicy Southwestern Bean. I still craved a piping hot bowl of broth-and-protein in the early afternoon, but needed a change.

This week I decided to add a Chinese take-out touch to chicken noodle soup. And make a big batch on Sunday night. While I still like the hot and sour soup I posted two year ago, this one is much, much more filling. And if you are low on Asian pantry staples like canned bamboo shoots and lily buds, you can still make this. I went to the market and bought chicken breast, mushrooms, and scallions, et voilà. 

It took me too long to realize. What was missing in my life was a man. Specifically, a poultry butcher.

Yes, I learned to carve a whole chicken in culinary school, but bad student that I was, found it too much of a chore. After graduation I rarely brought home whole chickens to dissect. Instead, at the supermarket, I made a beeline for neatly packaged drumsticks and wings.

In China's wet markets, however, you can select your chicken from the poultry guys, who will pluck, carve, and bag your bird in a matter of minutes. The more expensive chickens at the wet markets are free-range, ol' skool-style, raised by local farmers who let them run around their neighborhoods and feed them grain or table scraps (consider the alternative.) The cheaper birds at the wet markets, not to mention any packaged chicken you'll find at supermarkets, are factory-farmed. These are what Chinese people mean when they refer to "chicken that has no chicken taste."

So, a poultry butcher is a lazy cook's best friend. Especially when it comes to making stupidly easy but insanely addictive dishes like Three Cup Chicken.

I worry a lot these days. Like everyone, I worry about how much longer this recession will last. I worry so many publications will fold that all freelancers will have to panhandle for survival. I worry nobody will pick up a real book anymore. The gloomy winter days aren't helping. Shanghai is so dreary I have not seen the sun in 3 weeks.

My eating habits are a good indication of my mood. When I'm cheery and light-hearted I'll fuss around with salads and labor-intenstive sweets. If I'm anxiety-ridden, comfort food is all I can stomach. 

So bring on the chicken noodle soup. Rather than the American version flavored with bay leaf and thyme, I decided to make a Sichuan-style broth with star anise, cinnamon, tangerine peel, and Sichuan pepper. (There will be a mild tingle from the peppercorn, to jazz things up.) The best part: you can shred leftover roast chicken, itself a cost-saver and recession favorite, and add it to the soup at the last minute. The simmering anise and cinnamon will make your kitchen smell good. And slurping the steamy chicken noodle soup will get you through these dark days.

Almost nobody in Hunan has ever heard of General Tso's Chicken, the most famous Hunan dish in America. Like many other American-Chinese favorites, the roots to China are vague but interesting.

You may know the dish as General Tsuo's, or Tzo's or Tao's or some other variation. You couldn't really pronounce the name, but order it anyway at Panda Garden because of its addictiveness. Who cares if it isn't really Chinese food, like your ABC friend hinted?

General Tso's Chicken became popular in America via some enterprisingly Taiwanese chefs who opened Hunan restaurants in New York in the 1970s. Hunan cuisine is traditionally very spicy, full of smoky chilis and pickled vegetables. But to appeal to American diners, the chefs started deep-frying, and sweetening the sauces. They improved upon each other's crispy chicken dishes until they got a crunchy, sweet, sour, and mildly spicy coating. You can read more about the history in Fuchsia Dunlop's NYT article, or Jennifer 8. Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles; both writers trace the original General Tso's back to Taiwan.

I spent some part of my childhood living in Puerto Rico, in a small town near Ponce. I was the only Chinese kid in my kindergarten class, and my aunt and uncle ran the only Chinese restaurant in town. It was usually flooded with customers (especially on pay day), possibly because the place also doubled as an ice cream parlor. In addition to healthy portions of tamarindo ice cream, there were huge platters of things like seafood fried rice with plantains and sweet and sour pork with fresh pineapples. It was considered Chinese by the local Puerto Ricans. My 5-year-old self, having recently moved from Guangzhou, thought it was Western food.

(Even though my little town lacked Chinese food, cities certainly had their fair share, as I learned after many weekends of eating at dim sum spots in San Juan and Ponce. It's like going from rural Kansas to San Francisco.)

Fermented black beans, while not as ubiquitous in Chinese cooking as soy sauce, are a worthy pantry staple for any Chinese cooking aficionado. These little soybeans, packed and fermented in salt, give a pungent dimension to your stir-fry sauces. You may have encountered them before in Cantonese black bean spare ribs (usually served at dim sum) or Sichuan dishes like mapo tofu or twice-cooked pork. Just a tiny amount can add a big whopping amount of umani to your everyday stir-fry.

Yesterday I stir-fried some chicken with the fermented black beans and a little chili oil, a landlubber's take on the Cantonese shrimp in black bean sauce I've eaten many times over.  You can find these little beans at any Chinese grocery store, packed in plastic. Before using, rinse them in water or rice wine to get rid of excess grit. I store my black beans in the fridge in a little plastic container, but I know tons of cooks who keep them in cabinets; with tons of salt and no moisture, bacterial growth is minimal.

Do you cooked with fermented black beans, and if so, what's your favorite dish to make with them?

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Other chicken recipes: