Chicken Lo Mein

This is a lot like fried rice from way back when. However, I think it's a little more exciting. Or at least, I took some more liberties with the recipe. This turned into an add-whatever-you-want kind of recipe so I can't provide precisely how much of everything I put in. However, I can say with confidence that the meal is pretty robust.

Ingredients:

1 lb	dry spaghetti (I prefer whole wheat)
5	carrots, grated coarsely or sliced thinly
8	asparagus stalks, chopped
2	small broccoli heads, floreted
4	celery stalks, chopped
1	jalapeño pepper, seeded and diced
1	onion, chopped
3	garlic cloves, minced
2	eggs, scrambled
1/2 lb	chicken, cut small
1 can	sliced water chestnuts
maybe 1/4 cup	soy sauce
a few tbs	cock sauce
to taste	whatever you want

Procedure:
Cook the spaghetti mostly, leaving it a firm al dente. It'll finish up later. Drain and set aside. If you're not running the vegetables concurrently, you may want to toss them with some oil to keep them from clumping while they wait.



Cook the chicken most of the way through. Add vegetables. You can add sauce as you go to prevent you from needing more oil. Stir this all around until they start to soften.



Add the pasta and stir a lot. At this point it's also time to go crazy with sauces. The pasta isn't quite done yet, so it's really thirsty. I stuck with mostly soy sauce and hot sauce. I also threw in a few tablespoons of brown sugar, a floop of barbecue sauce, some lemon juice, and a bunch of black pepper. It turned out not particularly sweet, so I think another avenue would be to use a lot more brown sugar as well as some jam.





Cook this until it's done. There are plenty of noodles, so ever so often you can just grab one out and eat it. This will also allow you to keep tabs on your seasoning. If you cook it for too long your pasta will start to dry out. This is why you want your vegetables to be mostly cooked at the point where you add the pasta.



Makes 6 large servings.

This is a really fun recipe because you can really throw in whatever you want. If you screw it up, you've just invented something new ("it's not a bug, it's a feature"). The choices of vegetables and sauces are completely free.

I had chicken in this but it's really not an important feature. The noodles really trump it; this meal would lose little by the omission of the meat. The eggs were similar. I would next time either up the egg count to three or skip them entirely. They come up sufficiently infrequently that you forget about them, then, every time you get a piece, you wonder what it is.

I've found that I really like asparagus. Make sure to not cook it into a mush though. You cut the carrots small so they'll cook before your asparagus is obliterated. Same for the celery.

Enjoy!