What went wrong???? : The Squash Disaster

Last night, as happens not infrequently, a bunch of people ended up at my house, and I fed them.

"Come over for Chinese food! I'm making Szechuan pork!" OK, fine, I actually texted "You want chinee foo? I make stir fly!" Because I'm a jerk. Moving on.

This was to be based on a delicious dish I had at Grand Sichuan the other night-- sliced golden butternut squash, strips of juicy pork, and a spicey glaze. I julienned the meat of a whole butternut squash (and bear the calluses to prove it, chopped up some Garlic, and because the only pork at Pathmark was "self basting" ("Meat Injected with 15% Basting Fluids!") I opted for some skirt steak, which was actually OK (i.e. didn't smell like a shit-eating donkey's sportsbra, like almost everything there.)

I threw in some sesame oil, the butternut squash strips, the beef, garlic, red pepper flakes, and then-- no soy sauce. I forgot that my Godsend of a boyfriend had cleaned out our condiment graveyard just recently. GREAT. No oyster sauce, no soy, HOW WAS I GOING TO MAKE THIS SHIT TASTE ASIATIC??? All my suburban-mom stir-fry elements were gone. So I dumped balsamic vinegar and rice wine vinegar. AS IF that would make soy sauce. THe whole thing turned into a brown, sloppy, vinegary mess.


Jules makes a delicate szechuan specialty!

I apologize to my diners for that disgusting crap. It reminds me of the time I invited over for dinner my lengthily-eyelashed friend Mike, whom regular readers of "Beans Beans" will remember fondly from our Bryant Park lunches and his near-death from being a heavily sinning Jew. I "braised" turkey legs by systematically extracting every iota of flavor, juice, or succulence from the flesh and ending up with what tasted like, in Mike's words, "a stack of notecards." (He can be a real charmer.) I still don't understand how I did that.

Well, I guess Karma got me backhand-style for thinking I could whip up a sophisticated szechuan dish with no preparation, no research, and not a single proper ingredient. Or, as Confucius would say, "You cook like a dickhead, your food taste like pee pee."