KUNG-FUSION

Leave it to the Missus to come up with a new twist on an old favorite.

We grabbed dinner this evening at one of the local Chinese joints. It seems that if you want to open a restaurant in east Cobb these days, your choices are Mexican and Chinese, so we had plenty to choose from. The Bamboo Bistro – just up the street a few hundred yards – is where we ended up.

These days, it’s all about the pan-Asiatic cuisine. We have a Chinese-Tibetan place not too far away, and any number of Chinese-Thai restaurants. But the Bamboo Bistro not only offers Chinese and Thai dishes, it even has kimchi – supercharged Korean sauerkraut - available for an appetizer.

I started with the kimchi and ordered chicken panang curry as my entrée. Extra spicy, of course. And She Who Must Be Obeyed selected the egg foo young, a classic Cantonese preparation. Between the two of us, we hit the Korean-Thai-Chinese pan-Asian trifecta.

Here’s where the new twist comes in. SWMBO had requested that her egg foo young (an omelette-like affair crammed with vegetables and chicken and served buried in a gloppy brown gravy-like sauce) be brought out with the sauce on the side. Instead of moistening it with said gravy-like glop, she snagged a few spoons of the panang curry sauce and drizzled it over the omelettes.

Oh. My. Gawd.

I felt like Watson at the transcendent moment of discovery when Alexander Graham Bell realized that his voice had been carried over an electric wire: privileged to be present at the birth of a Great Idea.

Panang Curry Egg Foo Young! A perfect fusion of Thai and Chinese. Why, it’s Kung-Fusion Cuisine!

I shall shout it from the rooftops. I shall shout it in the corridors. I shall shout it in great auditoriums. Panang Curry Egg Foo Young – O, how yummy thou art!

(And my ass will probably be doing some shouting of its own later this evening. Kimchi and extra-spicy panang curry. What the fuck was I thinking?)