Fried rice

Originally, I only wanted to try non Chinese-style dishes, the idea being that I've had quite enough of Chinese cuisine and I could experiment with that under actual Chinese supervision, whereas experimenting with other cuisines allows for a broader spectrum of foods. But I have five pounds of rice to get rid of, so I had to get rid of it by making "western-style" fried rice today. Loophole? Maybe.

Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will breach the frontiers of culinary science armed with a giant knife and a bottle of cumin. Today's dish is western-style fried rice.

Man, if I had added some shrimp, I could serve this stuff in fake Chinese restaurants.

"Fried rice?" I hear you cry in astonished disbelief. "Blasphemy! Travesty! Woe!" You hold your head and tear your hair wildly. You scream and rage against the heavens. Your very wrath shatters the trembling firmament. Centuries from now, the distant descendants of humanity will feel the echoes of your indignant fury. "Fried rice! Unacceptable!"

Now hear me out. I had a lot of rice to get rid of. Furthermore, this is no ordinary fried rice. This fried rice was made with uncooked rice. So traditionally, for those who are not "in the know," fried rice is made with leftover cooked rice. You steam the rice the night before, maybe refrigerate it, maybe leave it out, and then fry it the next day to make it taste better. It's a really easy recipe, but it requires steaming the rice, which is pretty annoying without a rice cooker.

So, I thought to myself, what's the goal of my mission with this Saturday Supper thing. Making delicious dishes? Making nutritious dishes? Making ambitious dishes? No. My goal is to make expeditious dishes, that is, fast and easy. (As a side-effect, they may also turn out to be pernicious dishes, but luckily I haven't had a problem with that yet). I thought, how can I make fried rice even easier? The answer is, of course, don't even cook the rice before frying it!

I found this trick online, and Feng and I both seriously doubted it would work. The idea is to fry the uncooked rice in oil until it's relatively well-fried, then cook it in liquid afterwards so that you're essentially cooking pre-fried rice. The rice absorbs in the liquid rather quickly, strangely (I was imagining the oil like a hydrophobic membrane, such that hydrophilic water couldn't penetrate it, but I guess not). Using some chicken broth in place of soy sauce or oyster sauce makes it sufficiently non-Chinese to allow me to stick to my "no Chinese food" rule. Then everything else is pretty standard.

There's really not much I can say about fried rice. It's basically the most standard full meal you can make with rice, so...that's that. I tried to spice it up a bit by pouring in copious amounts of cumin and garlic pepper. I wouldn't say it was spiced up so much as "made into fried cumin with rice flavor," not that there's anything wrong with that.

Well that's all for tonight. I've got some more recipes lined up for the next few weeks, and they should have some more variety, except, you know, they'll all be rice-based. Maybe, anyways. I might actually just make tons of more fried rice and get rid of it that way.