The taste of YUMMY: China Pearl

Yesterday a few of us were on-call for Christmas day, but managed to snag the evening off. Our dilemma was this: 3 of us don't know how to cook (1 of us is actually a fire hazard... yes... that 1 would be me), and Christina was stuck in the Worcester boonies all day - meaning she didn't have time to cook.

So, we decided to have a Jewish-style Christmas dinner: i.e Chinese food. China Pearl is a restaurant on Tyler Street in Boston's Chinatown that I've been to once or twice for dim sum, and it was overall decent. Thus, this was the place I decided to order take-out from last night.

As we were waiting for the OR to finish preparing for an emergent endoscopic decompression of a sigmoid volvulus, I was on the phone trying to decide how best to balance a meal that had to satisfy both the vegetarian(s) in our group as well the carnivores.

Yes - that's right: as my patient was lying there on a stretcher with his colon dilated to the diameter of my thigh, I was wondering: "what's for dinner?"

Here's what I finally decided on:

Vegetarian egg rolls: (primarily filled with cabbage, carrots, and bean sprouts)

Vegetarian dumplings: (these were filled with chives and tofu)

Tofu and vegetable cow fun:

Sauteed pea-vines:

Sesame chicken:

Fortunately we were able to successfully decompress and untwist the sigmoid volvulus quickly, and I managed to make make it to Chinatown before 7 (thanks to my speed-demon driving skills and awesome Droid GPS).

The egg rolls were pretty good. Despite being ordered to-go and having to survive a 30 minute drive to Sayuri's place, they stayed quite crispy.

The vegetarian dumplings though, were a miss. I wasn't a fan of the flavor of the tofu and chive filling, and the wrapper was way too thick

The tofu and vegetable chow fun was good - the noodles were soft and had just the right amount sauce.

Sesame chicken is pretty hard to mess up, so that dish was tolerable too, but certainly not the best that I've had.

Last but not least was the sauteed pea-vines, which is typically one of my favorite Chinese vegetarian dishes. China Pearl used maybe a bit too much oil in the cooking, but this was still my personal favorite entree out of the three.

At the end of dinner Sayuri offered up snowman-shaped PEEPs for dessert, but all of us universally hate marshmallow. One thing I learned from my high school Chemistry class though, was the fact that PEEPs are VERY flammable. Must be a combination of all the extra sugar-coating and the abundance of air within the marshmallow.