Peanut and I both love to cook, but we also both love to eat, and sometimes we want to do the latter without going to all the trouble of the former. I’m sure we’d spend an hour or more preparing a fresh, lovely supper every night if we could, but since we work full-time jobs with overlapping schedules it’s not always in the cards.
Fortunately, modern American cuisine has us covered with a huge smorgasbord of pre-packaged easy-to-prepare foodstuffs. Most of these are at least edible, a few are pretty wretched. Some are absolutely divine, though, as is the case with…
I’ve been eating this stuff practically non-stop since I was a kid. It’s a staple in the Brickroad household at least once a week.
The La Choy chow mein dinner comes in three components. The first two are cans, joined together by the most irritating piece of blue tape ever conceived by man. The top can contains a quantity of gravy and a few bites of chicken. The contents of this can look a little like cat food if you were to prepare it on its own. The larger, bottom can contains vegetables and needs to be drained before preparing. The truly magical part, though, is the bag of chow mein noodles, which I affectionately refer to as “crunchities”.
Sometimes I buy bags of crunchities just to munch on by themselves. They are the perfect snack food. If you plan to enjoy them like this, though, I suggest you buy them in a resealable can rather than a bag.
The way to prepare La Choy chow mein is to dump both cans into a big pot, stirring occasionally until it’s hot enough to eat. Time elapsed from unopened can to full belly: about twenty minutes. You can’t beat that.
We usually fry up a chicken breast or two before combinine the cans of vaguely-Asian slop. There’s not as much meat in the gravy can as there used to be.
A few minutes later…
Voila! Hamburger Helper is for chumps.
Pros:
- Pretty tasty for something you buy in a can for like five bucks.
- Takes just a couple minutes to make.
- You absolutely can not screw up the preparation of this product, unless your stove literally explodes partway through cooking.
- Makes enough for dinner, plus lunch the next day.
- Leftover crunchities!? Not for long!
Cons:
- Not very colorful. (Needs more green celery, yellow corns or purple horseshoes.)
- Healthy? What’s that?
- Gordon Ramsay will make fun of you.
This is the saltiest chow mein I’ve ever tasted.
Need advice on how to separate the 2 cans. It is difficult!
There’s a blue sticker in between the two cans that you just peel off and the cans come right apart! 🙂
Thanks! Description of the annoying tape helped me lol
I cut my thumb trying too separate them I finally opened the small one and dumped it out and then wing to sink, flipped it over and opened bottom one. That is a horrible patent. I had to resort to a knife which is how I cut myself.