Carrying on a venerable Jewish tradition, I decided to eat Chinese food for dinner.

Often, Chinese-Americans were the only other sizeable non-Christian population overlapping with Jewish communities. American Jews liked Chinese food anyway — so much so that, as recounted in Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint", the pork and shrimp in Chinese food were treated as less trefe than if those verboten meats were eaten elsewhere.

Anyhow, my cooking options were limited (time to go shopping tomorrow), and A&J restaurant in Annandale is the bomb. So, off I went.

Dim Sum is great because the dishes are so inexpensive; for about $12, I got tea, some pork in a sesame bun, a fried beef dumpling and three more exotic, um, treats. Unfortunately, my camera's batteries died as I turned it on in the restaurant; my descriptions will try to compensate for it. With Pam out of town, I decided to order adventurously:

• Bean curd with thousand-year old egg: The bean curd itself is nothing crazy. Picture cold, scrambled egg whites in sesame oil. Pretty unambitious, but it works. The egg, however, was another story. It was black. Literally. The yolk looked like it had been soaked in ink, but otherwise was pretty similar to a hard-boiled one. The white was freaking insane though. Picture black licorice jello, in the shape of an egg. It was not only gelatinous in texture, but was actually translucent.
• Tripe soup: It was actually surprising I didn't like this one; I think it was how the tripe was cut. I can dig it in Latin American stews and can even palate tripe in my Vietnamese Pho. But something about it just didn't work. The soup had a clear, salty beef base. And the tripe — well, remember how we'd crumple up those paper straw wrappers, when we were kids, and then add a few drops of water, so that the paper uncrumbled itself? The tripe looked like the paper halfway through that process. And it had the texture of a perforated al dente pasta.
• Shredded pig ear: Dogs love this. I didn't. It looked fucking disgusting — literally like a shredded version of the smoked pig ears you see in the pet section of the supermarket. It tasted so-so; it was marinated in one of those generic Asian salty-brown sauces. The texture was not as chewy as I feared, but still chewy. Like a seaweed salad. And it was served cold, which made it seem chewier

The lady asked me if I wanted to take any home. No. "You no like?" No, I fibbed, I just like to sample a little bit of a variety of dishes.

Afterwards, I went to the Asian grocer next door and picked up two large jars of a disgusting food that I have grown to love — Kim Chee, pickled cabbage in a chili-garlic paste — a pleasant result of my culinary bravery.

Yesterday, FWIW, I had kabobs for dinner and I got an A Salaam Aleichem on the way in. I guess, in the dark, I looked like a Levant (Syrian/Lebanese/Palestinian) Arab.

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