Samoan Chop Sui

Samoan Entree

CHOP SUI

INGREDIENTS

½ pound noodles, rice vermicelli or bean thread
4 cups chicken broth and water as necessary to cover noodles
1 medium onion
1 fresh bok choy or 2 cups Chinese cabbage
1 pound chicken breast
2 tablespoons peanut oil or vegetable oil
2 teaspoons minced garlic
1¼ teaspoons minced ginger
1 cup soy sauce
¼ cup kecap manis or soy sauce
3 spring onions

SPECIAL UTENSILS

colander
kitchen scissors

Serves 4. Takes 45 minutes.

PREPARATION

Add rice noodles to large pot. Add hot chicken and as much hot water as necessary to cover noodles. Drain in colander, reserving 1 cup chicken broth from pot. Dice onion. Shred bok choy. Cut chicken into ½” cubes.

Add oil and green onion to pot. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens. Stir frequently. Add chicken cubes, minced garlic, and minced ginger. Stir until well blended. Reduce heat to medium. Simmer for 10 minutes or until chicken cubes brown. Stir enough to ensure even browning.

Add reserved 1 cup chicken broth from pot, cooked noodles, bok choy. soy sauce, and kecap manis. Reduce heat to low-medium and simmer for 5 minutes. Stir frequently. Snip noodles into manageable bits with kitchen scissors or regular scissors. Dice spring onions. Garnish chop sui with spring onion.

TIDBITS

1) Pause and reflect.

2) Meditate.

3) Now look at the following pictures.

boulette                                                                         roulette

4) They look amazingly similar, don’t they? This is no accident.

5) The picture on the left is a boulette wheel.

6) The one on the right is a roulette wheel.

7) Boulette and roulette are both games of chance.

8) They are both played with a bowl.

9) The two games are fun ways to lose money quickly.

10) Boulette means little bowl in French. Roulette translates as little wheel.

11) If these two gambling ventures are so similar, how is it that we only play roulette?

12) Both games involves spinning.

13) In roulette, a finely balanced wheel is spun within a bowl. However in boulette, the entire bowl is spun. Spinning a bowl works fine when it sits on a well oiled table. Well sort of. An over enthusiastic spin will send the bowl off the table where it will shatter into a million pieces.

14) Also, it is remarkably hard to spin a bowl of chop sui that’s atop tablecloth. Go ahead, try it. On second thought, no. And then, and then, so many games of boulette ended when a hungry gambler ate the chop sui. No chop sui, no pointer green onion to point at a number, no game. And so, boulette rapidly fell out of favor. Long live roulette.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.