Adventures in Fried Rice

Posted on: December 30, 2008

It is a well known fact that fried rice is delicious. As someone who spends money on groceries on a regular basis, I recently realised the fact that most of the ingredients in fried rice are quite cheap. And thus comes (da da dun) the fried rice adventure.

I’ve never made fried rice before. So, of course, being all excited and frothy about my impending delicious excursion, I decided to ignore any advice that might actually prove useful. Drew informed me, via his connections in the rice world, that fried rice is best made with day old rice, as the texture is much better. So of course, my solution was to make the rice about 5 hours before I needed it. And, due to the fact I made approximately 9784392834 cups of rice, all but the top layer was still fresh and warm by the time I started working with it. So alas, the fried rice came out much fluffier then intended. Some of this I can blame on my inability to stick with a recipe.

It’s like this, see. If you google ‘fried rice recipe’, you come up with approximately 971,000 results. That’s a lot of fried rice recipes. How could I possibly pick just one?!? So I glanced at a few, and took a wild stab at how much rice I should make, said ‘wild stab’ being 3 cups worth. Which makes 6 cups of cooked rice. Which is a helluva lot of rice. And that’s just the rice alone, not including any vegetable additions. No, really, it’s a lot of freaking rice!

But I digress.

I fried a few eggs, along with what seemed like entirely too much oil, then set that aside. Then I gathered together all of the lonely stray vegetables curled up at the bottom of the fridge, and pulled a few sleepy ones from the freezer. They danced gaily in the wok together, invigorated by the vegetable oil, garlic, and ginger. It was like a party on my stove, the only things missing were party hats and very tiny martini glasses!

vegetable party

Next came the rice. The massive dumping in of the rice. And the utter demolition of my remaining soy sauce, and it apparently takes quite a bit to season 6 cups of rice. This picture really does not do the volume justice here.

Fried rice massiveness

The fried rice turned out quite tasty. The next time you have a bunch of leftover vegetables, rice, and the strong desire to eat the exact same thing for the next fourteen meals, I highly recommend repeating this process.

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.