I've found that keeping up with the blogging when Tony and I have been trying so many new things is sometimes a little difficult with the schedule I keep. For a while there, he and I were in a bit of a food rut. We got sick of all the things we'd been making that were just cheap and easy fixes. All of it had culminated in a large fight, a night of Taco Bell, and a scouring of Pinterest together to find recipes we both agreed on to have a meal plan in place. Really, we should have been doing that anyway to keep our budget in line. Food boredom just happened to be the thing that motivated us to do it more than money. The point is all of it has resulted in a great deal of food I want to write about and not enough time do it. I try to blog in bursts and schedule them out or take my days off--like today--to catch up.
That said, I made fried rice on Friday. Tony really enjoys fried rice. Sometimes when we go out for Asian food, he simply orders chicken fried rice. It's such a simple dish that it's sort of a no-brainer to make it at home. The great thing about it is that it's a perfect day-after food. It can be made to use up left-over rice when you just don't feel like putting in that much effort. If you're like me, you can also do the rice the lazy way and use minute rice, which produces the same food in less time and effort. It may not be quite as tasty as regular rice, but it speaks to the laziness that lives in my soul. (If you're wondering, I comfort myself with the knowledge that, lazy as I am, I do still take the time to cook for myself and Tony. It's more than I can say for some of my peers who don't even really know how to care for themselves.)
I find that the difference between a delicious fried rice and mediocre one is in the oil. Sesame oil produces the best flavor. It has a nutiness to it that just adds tremendously to the rice. I find that fried rice that hasn't been made with sesame or peanut oil often has a blander flavor.
The fried rice we had on Friday was a joint effort. Tony had pre-made the minute rice and chopped the vegetables when I got home, so all I had to do was assemble and cook. We included the following:
- Four servings of minute rice according to the package (we buy off-brand because we are lazy and cheap!)
- 1/2 cup chopped onion
- 1/2 cup chopped celery
- 1/2 cup chopped carrot (we approximated the veggies because we're also too lazy to accurately measure)
- 1 6 ounce package precooked Tyson oven roasted chicken chunks
- freshly grated ginger to taste
- soy sauce to taste
- 1 egg
- 1-2 green onions.
I coated the pan with sesame oil, sauteed the vegetables first, and added the ginger and chicken chunks just until the chicken warmed up. Then, I added the rice and soy sauce, adding a little bit more sesame oil and evenly distributing the oil and soy sauce. Once it was all a uniform color, I added the egg. I mixed it all around until the egg was fully cooked and pieces of it were visible in the rice. I garnished it with the green onion. I drizzled a little more sesame oil on top of mine, and that was that! We had dinner.
I find that this a really great dinner for nights when intensive cooking is not called for. I had no desire to spend the majority of my day in the kitchen Friday night. So we made something quick and ate in the living room while watching gardening and cooking shows on Hulu. Secretly, Tony and I are really in our 60s, we just live in the bodies of a 32 year-old and a 28 year-old, respectively. Occasionally, we have nights like Friday where this is incredibly evident to both of us, and Friday was one of those nights. At least we had some good food.
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