Every year Lois of Greenfield Center invites 40 friends to her beautiful home to celebrate the Chinese New Year. It's a reunion dinner to usher in wealth, happiness, and good fortune for all. Lois decorates the kitchen in bright red hanging lanterns and mini dragon party favors. Tsingtao beer and rice wine flow easily between bites of dry noodles and spring rolls. Families bring their little ones to tear through the house scaring the wits out of the growing guppies in Lois’s aquarium.
The cooking process is done in record time with the help of two gigantic restaurant-size cooking woks. Friends pitch in mixing up dishes of classical Chicken Chop Suey with seasoned oil, bean sprouts, green peppers, water chestnuts, fresh mushrooms, bamboo shoots, bunches of bok choy, and, of course, shredded fresh ginger root. Sticky white rice tops off the delicious entree.
There is but one caveat - chopsticks. You need to know how to use chopsticks. But, that's a bonus in my book because the chewing tempo slows allowing everyone a chance to digest their food and share in conversation. The woman to my right parties with pop-singer Pink and on my left, another gal can't get enough of NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! with Peter Sagal. I was in good company.
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