Chinese Confection Prognostications and Provocations

Fenya's boyfriend Bobby stayed for supper tonight, which sort of monkey-wrenched my plans in one way (as I had only thawed enough meat for four servings), but also enabled me in a far more important way, as we had been lamenting that very afternoon about just how long it had been since we'd ordered take-out Chinese food.

The only way to view the Happy Palace menu online currently is though the Skip the Dishes interface, which I find clumsy and irksome. It took us almost entirely emptying the coupon drawer to find a paper menu, and half-an-hour later, Glory and I were driving home with two bags of cuisine Chinoise.

In all honesty, I've had better food than Happy Palace, but I've paid more for it too, and they hit a sweet spot right in the middle for me, and so it has become our go-to on such occasions (also their shrimp in lobster sauce is tremendous, and hardly anyone else in our neck of the woods seems to serve it).

On occasion, they've stiffed us on the fortune cookies (which I find personally irritating; if I order 4 entrees and you send two cookies, do you think I'm eating all that food by myself or what?), but we got enough to around tonight plus a spare.

Now, if you've seen Iron Man 3, you already know that fortune cookies (like chop suey and so much other North American Chinese food) are by no means authentically Asian. The biscuit portion is actually from a Japanese recipe.  Also, the fortunes are typically vague or inaccurate, limiting their usefulness as an aid in making important decisions or otherwise planning one's life.

But in disseminating these crispy desserts around the table, we made a shocking discovery: Bobby had never played the "Between the Sheets" game so commonly associated with fortune cookies.

In case you also are new to this phenomenon, the game is played as follows: after opening the cookie, you read the fortune aloud, but add the words "between the sheets" or "in bed" to the recitation, usually creating awkward phraseology or a crude double entendre (and rarely, both).

They don't always work:

"Uh, for what, again, exactly...?"

And sometimes they provoke a mirthful chuckle; an intellectual acknowledgment moreso than an emotional one.

Well, one certainly hopes so, in this context...

Sometimes the wording makes you picture a scene from a bedroom farce.

"Ho ho, most amusing indeed!"

At other times the response is a chorus of "well, yeah..." or perhaps "duh!"...

Again, this is hardly a surprise (between the sheets!).

It would seem foolish to deny this (between the sheets or otherwise).

But there was no doubt in anyone's mind tonight, that poor, semi-sheltered Bobby, dining with his girlfriend's family and forced to participate in a ridiculous and pseudo-risque game involving the widely debunked augury of baked goods foreign or domestic, had the best one of the night:

"...(ahem)"

But any discomfort he might have felt was quickly washed away in peals of laughter and perhaps a bit of reddening in the face of my eldest.