When I still lived in the States, I worked for the U.S. Postal Service reading and keying in the addresses for pieces of mail that the electronic readers couldn’t decipher. I worked there for four years and to date it’s the only “real job” (meaning that I worked there full-time, year-round) that I’ve ever had. It was more than enough for me.

But this is not about that, precisely.

We worked various permutations of the swing shift there, meaning that our lunch hour came at dinnertime. Most often I took my lunch, in the form of one or another frozen microwave-able meals, but sometimes I went to one of the nearby restaurants, Wendy’s, Subway, or a local Chinese place.

My favorite was the Chinese place, both because they gave us their lunch specials for dinner if we showed our USPS badges, and because they had terrific food. My favorite meal there was chicken and peapods with rice. Because I don’t eat meat, I would pick out the chicken and give it to a co-worker or throw it away. It grossed me out a little bit to have to deal with it at all, but the rest of the food was so good that I kept ordering it. One evening I got the bright idea to ask them if I could have it without the chicken, and they said, “Sure, no problem,” from then on giving me a heaping serving of rice accompanied by a nice side of sauce with peapods and onions and nary a bit of chicken to be found, for the low, low price of $4.99.

For the past little while I have been craving that dinner like nobody’s business, but I can’t seem to find a similar recipe online. All of the recipes I’m seeing have a lot more ingredients than I want. I’m aware that there’s probably zero chance that what I was eating then was truly vegetarian, and being that I’m not a strict, strict vegetarian myself, I could deal with a little oyster sauce or what-have-you. What I don’t want is celery or bell peppers or ginger or any of the other myriad additions that are in the recipes I’ve found. The sauce that I want has just peapods and onions, along with the sauce-y ingredients (probably oyster sauce, soy, oil, and other sorts of seasonings).

(And as if missing and not being able to recreate one of my favorite meals from times past weren’t bad enough, somehow my keyboard has gotten switched from the Swedish to the English setting, and I can’t get it to go back. {Okay, I can get it to go back, but I can’t get it to stay back — I think I’ll have to re-start my browser.} After more than four years, I scarcely remember where all the punctuation keys and whatnot are on the English keyboard, so typing out this long entry has been quite the exercise in trial and error, not to mention frustration.)