Cooking Asian

One of the literary pleasures of cooking Asian foods is reading the packages of the ingredients. Tonight I fixed a Mu Shoo Vegetable dish with rice noodles (Sinbo Jiang Xi Rice Stick). Here are the simple 3-step instructions for cooking the noodles:

1. Put rice stick in boiling water and cook for 6-8 minutes, stirring occasionally.

OK, that’s pretty straight forward, as long as you’re not looking around for a stick made of rice but realize the reference is to the noodles.

2. Flush rice stick with cold water or tap water for for 1 minutes.

Here it gets more problematic. One might be inclined on first reading to flush the rice stick (noodles) down the toilet, but one has to interpret “flush” as “rinse,” or the whole dish is lost. But there are still questions: What’s the difference between “cold water” and “tap water”? Does the “cold water” have to be bottled? Or from a mountain stream? Does the “tap water” have to be tepid, warm, or hot? Or can it be cold as well? And we’ll just assume the “for for” is a typographic tic. But what does “1 minutes” mean? Could it be another typo? – “1 minute”? or maybe “10 minutes”?

3. Then it can be finally treated rice stick in soup and other different ways. e.g. fried rice stick, cold-dressed rice stick, etc.

Let’s ignore the confusion of the two Latin abbreviations (the writer was probably a marginal graduate from an American community college), but what might “finally treated rice stick” mean? Maybe just “used”? And I can only, using my graduate degree in English literature, deconstruct “fried rice stick” to mean “stir fry” and “cold-dressed rice stick” to mean “salad.”

But then explication is one of the pleasures that Asian cooking affords.