The Short Tempered Chef Woks up Some Beef & Lettuce Stir Fry

I’ve been watching too many episodes of Samurai Gourmet on Netflix. I’ve become wok-obsessed. Those guys on the show cook everything from scrambled eggs to tuna fish sandwiches in their darn woks, and it all comes out looking scrumptious. Plus it only takes them twenty seconds or so to make a full course meal in one fell swoop. So I’ve turned my back on my faithful fry pan and gone whoring after asian ambiance with a big clunky wok I borrowed from my daughter Sarah about a year ago -- and if she thinks she’s ever getting it back, she can kiss my sashimi.

I wanted something simple but elegant -- messing around with half a dozen pots and pans to prepare my meals is not something I relish. It makes me REALLY short tempered, cuz of the clean up. I’m so lazy that my idea of housecleaning is to flush the toilet once a week.

I’m going to wok up some butter lettuce, red bell pepper, half a can of diced tomatoes I’ve got huddling in the fridge, and beef in a bottled Szechuan sauce -- the ingredients list red chili peppers second, so this stuff could be liquid dynamite. I’ll have to take it easy the first time so I don’t blow the roof of my mouth off. But I want to be able to TASTE the darn meal and break out into a minor sweat by the time I’m done. That, to me, is the only way to enjoy a meal -- with body tingling, short of breath, and exhausted by the end of it all. Kinda like sex used to be . . .

Well, kiddies, it turned out pretty darn good. A little soupy, because of the canned tomatoes, but that’s fine -- I’ll finish off the rest of it tonight as a soup with some toast. It was just spicy enough to tickle the back of my neck and bring a light sheen of sweat to my wrinkled brow. For dessert I had half a grapefruit and a stale donut that I microwaved for 15 seconds -- good as new. I washed it all down with a bottle of chocolate milk. How come they can't make a powdered mix that turns regular milk into the kind of chocolate milk you buy in the dairy case? Oh well. In the words of that famous sleuth/gourmand Nero Wolfe, the whole shebang was “Satisfactory.”