When the laundry isn’t done and papers aren’t written, you can’t dress up and you can’t go out. The only logical thing to do is dig out the famed Ugly Holiday Sweater, order Chinese food and sulk.

Janet’s Ugly Holiday Sweater is a Christmas-themed one. Although we are admittedly closer to Thanksgiving than to Xmas, one can’t really afford to be choosy about one’s Ugly Holiday Sweater. You take what you can get, which in Janet’s case is a man-sized red sweater emblazoned with Santa Claus, who is yelling “Ho! Ho! Ho!” This is possibly a comment on Janet.

Ruth’s sweater is a Thanksgiving-themed one, which features a pilgrim smoking a pipe. We don’t know what’s in the pipe. But the pilgrim does have a bell on his hat. Both of our Holiday Sweaters are comfy. We don them, plus sweatpants. We buckle down to our Milton papers. We call up Jing Jing Szechwan & Hunan Gourmet, mostly because they’ll deliver to the Stanford campus. We order.

Before we describe our Eating In adventure, let’s take a brief look at the Eating Out side of this equation. We’ve both been to Jing Jing before (on Emerson Street in Palo Alto) and have found it to be both prolific and spicy. The menu is extensive and treatise-like, so there is no dearth of choice. Jing Jing is a typical American Chinese restaurant — the sort of place that serves bastardized versions of Chinese dishes without shame and with a significant amount of grease. This is fine, this is comforting — this is America. You should also know that Jing Jing doesn’t bill itself as “The Hottest Place in Town” for nothing. Watch out for menu items with tiny chili peppers next to them; you might be interested in exploring the “Mild” versions of these dishes.

Although we were fairly excited about eating at Jing Jing (excited enough to return), we were wary about ordering in. After all, endless fuck-ups can occur in the delivery process: mistaken addresses, incorrect dishes, leaking hot sauce, an odd number of chopsticks... One must really have one’s shit together in order to run a satisfactory delivery service. And the good news is that Jing Jing does deliver well, which is excellent for these writers who are tired of engaging in endlessly irritating negotiations with Pizza My Heart.

Being tied to you, Gentle Reader, by bonds of trust and mutual esteem, we are obligated to acknowledge that delivery food is un petit peu shameful. It’s not real gourmandizing. For one, it brings up a number of questions, such as Why are you too lazy to put on some real pants and get on a bloody Marguerite? or Why can’t you just be normal like the rest of us and subsist on Ramen and powdered hot chocolate eaten straight out of the packet? The practice of ordering in is, while admittedly kind of wonderful, inescapably slovenly and indulgent, which is why you have to do it in your most shameful of shameful garments: the Holiday Sweater. And so we placed our order via phone (one may pay by credit card over the phone) and sat eagerly in wait, adjusting our sweaters.

The food arrived in a timely fashion, about 30 minutes post-order, and was delivered directly to our second-floor double without confusing phone calls about Where exactly are you, and what is a Durand? The food was hot, spill-free and neatly packaged, with plates and utensils thoughtfully included for the kitchen-less undergraduate. We hurriedly unpacked our choices — pork dumplings, broccoli with garlic sauce and orange chicken — and made quick work of our meal, dropping the occasional unexpected morsel of chicken on our Holiday Sweaters.

Jing Jing is nothing if not dependable. The quality of the food is consistent and decent, if not stellar. The pork dumplings, for example, are like Ruth: they’re not great, but they’re not terrible. They consist of strangely cohesive lumps of somewhat-flavorful, blandly-textured pork bundled tightly into dough pockets. The point is, they’re warm, somewhat tasty, they come with an interesting sauce, and they’re comforting. Which is really what one is looking for when one is wearing an Ugly Holiday Sweater and trying to write about John fucking Milton.

If you’re big on appetizers, other items worth investigation include the egg rolls and the hot & sour soup (served hot, not cold). Moving on to our veg: the broccoli with garlic sauce is one of those items for which the “Mild” option might be appropriate. You know that face cats make when they vomit and they’re really surprised and they cough and sputter? Well that’s the face Ruth makes when she eats this broccoli — the dish is initially surprising, though eventually delicious. Which is not to suggest that cat vomit is eventually delicious, but merely that it shares that element of initial surprise.

The orange peel chicken was the standout of our sad little late-night dinner. Although the chicken is listed on the “Hot & Spicy” menu, this listing is a patent lie. The chicken is neither hot nor spicy, unless one is in possession of a truly weak palate. This chicken, which some of you American-Chinese-food-connoisseurs may also know as General Tso’s Chicken, is a must-have dish at Jing Jing. Unlike the potstickers, it is not merely acceptable, but excellent. The chicken comes in manageable, bite-sized pieces which contain just the right ratio of chicken to fried-surface and are covered in an intriguing orange sauce, the ingredients of which we do not care to know, lest they ruin our love of this superb dish.

Other especially tempting entrees include mu-shu pork, sweet & sour pork, Mongolian beef and any of the chow meins. Although Jing Jing offers so many meat dishes, their meat is of a consistently high quality, so you need not worry about venturing into the dustier corners of the menu. The cold soups and straight-up vegetable dishes are, however, generally less interesting than the rest of the menu, and Jing Jing is consequently not very vegetarian-friendly. Sorry. But it is sharing-friendly, so make sure you have a friend with whom to share your late-night snacks, because this food at its most enjoyable when you can order several dishes and pass them around.

Although this meal was slightly more expensive than a pizza (entrees are around $9 each), Jing Jing is appetizing comfort food, and who can put a price on that? It has the additional benefit of convincing Ruth that she is part of a Woody Allen studio-apartment dinner scene, in which Mia Farrow is very cute and ambles around with chopsticks, dropping lo mein on the floor. It’s a pity Mia didn’t wear more Ugly Holiday Sweaters.

Jing Jing delivers dinner from 4:30 - 9:30 on weekdays and 4:30 - 9:30 on weekends. For delivery to your sad little hovel, call (650) 328-6885. For more info, visit jingjinggourmet.com