I grew up on Chinese food. My family is Jewish and we were pretty conservative Jewish. My mother kept a kosher house. We didn’t eat meat and dairy together. We had separate plates, cutlery and cookware for meat and dairy. But we were Jewish. And that meant we LOVED Chinese food. We ate at the one restaurant in our area, Tung Sing, once a week. Or we’d take out from Tung Sing. We’d order barbecued spare ribs — pretending it wasn’t pork and crispy deep fried egg rolls.

This is how kosher we were. When we took out from Tung Sing, we’d eat on paper plates so the non-kosher food wouldn’t touch our kosher plates.

I started making my own lo mein shortly after I graduated college. I was living in Washington, D.C. then, in a big six-bedroom ramshackle town house in Mt. Pleasant that I shared with five other people. The unwritten rule was that if you were cooking, make enough for a lot of people. If it turned out the housemates were out, I’d call up a bunch of friends to see if anyone was hungry and within an hour I had an impromptu dinner party. We were all poor and my friends were always hungry.

I’ve tinkered with my recipe, taking some great advice from a number of online sites and stealing ideas from various Chinese restaurants I frequent. From a local place in Arcata, I discovered Szechuan pepper, which has a great unique taste, that’s like nothing else I’ve had. I learned to add Mirin, which is a Chinese cooking wine, or sake if I don’t have Kirin on hand. Sometimes I throw in ginger and Miso for umami. I buy noodles from a Japanese store in the next town over.

For vegetables, I slice up tofu, mushrooms and greens — this time I had collards on hand, but I’ve used kale or mustard greens. I threw in water chestnuts and bamboo shoots and a couple of eggs scrambled. I sauté each of the ingredients separately in my wok in hot toasted sesame oil with chopped garlic and onions. I do that while the water for the noodles is boiling. Chinese noodles don’t take long to cook. I empty the wok out, add some more toasted sesame oil then toss in the noodles. I pour some fish sauce over it. These days I am using Red Boat. And of course I pour in soy sauce, or tamari, if I have it. That’s it. I’d add carrots, but I didn’t have any. I might also add peas or snow peas. It is fun dish to cook and everybody loves it.