Monday, November 15, 2010

OPM and Ribbon

Something bothers me from time to time. I don't really know how to make chinese food. I must admit that the complex layers of flavours in some of the western-chinese dishes are beyond me. I don't like using store bought sauces to cheat and I can't figure them out on my own so whenever I'm craving chinese food, I order in. The reason this bothers me so much is that Chinese is expensive to order in (or rather, good chinese is expensive) and I crave it alot. And, we don't have an OPM in town so some of their absolutely fantastic dishes are out of my reach (or rather, an hour and a half out of my reach). I've already raved on here about OPM and some of their best dishes in my opinion: the mongolian beef, their chicken lettuce wraps, their drunken chicken... So I resolved last night to suck it up and learn how to make such dishes. My method: look for similar recipes online. The mongolian beef is the one that I will be most particular about because it's such a distinct flavour, and while I'm sure OPM uses cocoa in their's, the only recipes I've found so far use brown sugar but no cocoa. So, I went looking by sight and googled Mongolian Beef and looked through all the image hits and found a picture that looked most similar to what I've eaten at OPM. The image was from a blog that posted a recipe for Mongolian Beef that I fully intend to make sometime this week. Then I looked for a good Chicken Lettuce Wrap recipe which needed to include oyster sauce (I could tell that much from tasting it). I found one on About.com that looks promising and while I know I'll tweak and play with the recipes until I get them perfect, I think I won't need to do too much!
This weekend was a bit interesting. Things didn't quite work out the way I had planned them but I still managed to get some shopping done for Christmas crafts that I will be making. Ribbon was 50% off this week at Michaels so I got a bunch of types and today I set out to make ribbon ornaments as seen on marthastewart.com. I love Martha and all, but sometimes she forgets that some of us are incompetent. What she explains as being one simple step took me 30 minutes to figure out. And that was for one ornament (which didn't even work out by the way). I'm hopeful, however, that another style will be more user friendly for me, but that one does involve hot glue guns, so knowing my luck I'll come away with scars.
Did I mention we're selling some of our guppies? We have way too many in our tank right now and just had 3 more males mature this week, all with the same coloring. They're beautiful, but now we have 7 mature males and that's way too hard on the females in the tank, so baby production might actually stall because the females will be too stressed. So the simple solution is to sell some! I thought asking $10 for 1 male and 3 females was fair and they can have their pick of fish to a point. Obviously there will be some males that we'd rather keep for their colors. Then, once our tank is cleared out, we might get one or two new females with colors we don't already have and see what new colors we can get! Such a fun game!
This weekend we're having a South African themed meal with the inlaws and some friends. I volunteered to make a dish but I've got to be honest - I have no idea what counts as South African cuisine. Wish me luck!
Anyway, I've got a hat to knit today, groceries to buy and ribbon to torture myself with.

Mrs. Vander Leek ;)

1 comment:

  1. Hey there:)

    I came accross your post while looking for a mongolian beef recipe. I'm from Edmonton and we used to have an OPM here which however has been shut down for the past year, and since then I've been searching for the mongolian beef and drunken chicken recipe. I'm hoping you by some chance that you have very similar OPM recipes that you are willing to share. Good luck with your ongoing chinese recipes:)

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