Vegetarian Fried Rice

I ate a lot of fried rice growing up.

My mom loves to cook, and we ate a lot of different foods when I was young. I don't think I really realized how--varied? international? something like that--our diet was until I went to college.

Still, we did have a few staple recipes in frequent rotation. A lot of them were plays on pasta--pasta with tuna fish, clam spaghetti, garlic spaghetti, even, infrequently, spaghetti with meat sauce.

Another one of those staple recipes was fried rice. And for good reason--fried rice is cheap, easy, and makes a lot of food. Mom's version included ground beef as well as a couple of eggs, so it serviced adequately as a main dish. We ate a lot of it, and with gusto.

So it's perhaps surprising that I don't think I've ever made fried rice in the history of my married career.

For one, neither the DDH nor I are big rice eaters. I am stupidly terrible at cooking rice, and after suffering through one crunchy dish too many, the DDH learned to greet rice dishes with trepidation. Rice isn't cheap if you're ruining it (and all the ingredients you add to it) all the time.

For another, though I remember scarfing down huge portions of the dish as a child, I remember fried rice as being too salty, with a slightly weird sour flavor (sorry, Mom), and generally not interesting enough to attempt to recreate.

But since the DDH has flatly refused to acknowledge the awesomeness of Tuna Fish Pasta, and with the impending arrival of someone who will eventually be a teenage boy, I've decided I need to revisit some of those cheap-and-easy childhood staples.

Then I ended up with a whole bunch of free cooked rice, and I knew that it was time to tackle fried rice. I could attempt the recipe without risking poorly-cooked rice. And since I didn't need to spend forty minutes cooking rice, I could actually get dinner on the table on a Monday evening when I had a Zumba class quickly followed by a church meeting.

I tweaked my mom's recipes in a few ways.

First, I eliminated the ground beef, not because I don't like ground beef in fried rice but because I didn't have any defrosted and didn't really have time for the extra step of cooking it anyway. Eliminating that and the accompanying beef broth turned this into a vegetarian recipe, but I'll report back with a meaty version one of these days.

Second, having eliminated the beef, I needed to punch up the protein somehow. The bites of scrambled egg are my favorite part of fried rice anyway, so it was a no-brainer to increase the egg in the recipe.

Third, I cut back on the soy sauce, since I remembered it being too salty (though cutting the beef broth probably also saved some sodium).

And finally, I added some other sauces and spices to give it a more interesting flavor. Adding sambal oolek gives it a touch of bite--not what I think of as a lot, but you do taste it. In retrospect, it's possible that Mom's fried rice was mild-flavored because we were kids. Specifically, I'm the kid who liked everything bland and hated spicy foods. So, umm, keep in mind that it's probably entirely my fault her recipe wasn't perfect to begin with. I bet when she makes it for just herself and Dad it's deliciously seasoned. Ahem.

Vegetarian Fried Rice

Vegetarian Fried Rice
Adapted from my mom's recipe.

As I mentioned, I started with pre-cooked rice leftover from an office lunch. If you did not have the opportunity to rescue rice destined for the trash can, you should cook it first. Cook 1 1/2 cups rice according to package directions (to yield 3 cups rice, cooked). Set it aside and allow to cool. If you're really on top of things, you could cook the rice over the weekend and refrigerate it so it's ready to go for a fast weeknight dinner. I have never actually been this on top of things, but I pretend I am all the time.

Rice courtesy P.F. Chang's and my boss.

Once you have some nicely cooked rice ready to go, proceed with the recipe:

Chop 1 medium onion and 4-5 cloves garlic so they're ready to go. I speed-demoned them in the food processor:

to:

They never knew what hit them.

Heat 2 Tbs. oil in a large wok or skillet (if you know me, you know this is coconut oil, but clearly you can use whatever fat you'd like).

Add the onion and garlic

and sautee until onion is translucent.

Transluscent onion.

Add 12-16 oz. vegetables. The fastest and easiest is to use a bag of the small mixed veggies (peas, cube-cut carrots, and the like), but you can use any kind of frozen veggie mix or fresh vegetables. Almost any vegetable will taste good in fried rice.

I cut the bag open with scissors and still managed to spill
veggies all over the counter.

Cook until soft (aka thawed, if using frozen). You can stick the lid on the skillet to speed up the process.

Meanwhile, if you promise not to get distracted, scramble six eggs. I got distracted measuring out the ingredients for the next step and semi-burned the eggs. Luckily I sort of like semi-burned eggs, and the DDH didn't seem to notice. It's best if you don't get distracted, though.

Eggs.

Once your eggs are off the heat and your vegetables are done,

add 3 cups cooked brown rice and a scant 1/3 cup soy sauce (between the 1/4 cup and 1/3 cup lines).

Or more, if you like soy sauce.

In a measuring cup, spoon out 1 tsp. fish sauce and 1 tsp. sambal oolek/chile paste/hot sauce. Fill the measuring cup with water to make 1/4 cup liquid.

Add to the rice mixture.

Stir to combine and cook until rice is heated through.

Add your scrambled egg

 and mix thoroughly.

And there you have it. I was worried the DDH wouldn't find it filling enough without any meat, but six eggs seemed to add enough protein to satisfy him. Plus, brown rice tends to be pretty satisfying, fullness-wise, versus white rice. And then there's the fact that that particular combination of frozen vegetables is his favorite. At any rate, it got two thumbs up from him.

Quick, easy, cheap, tasty--it even tastes just as good the next day. Huzzah for fried rice!

Vegetarian Fried Rice

Lemon-Butter Tilapia

I like fish. Pretty much any kind of fish. Tilapia, catfish, salmon, trout. Fishy fishes, oily fishes, fried fishes.

We don't eat fish often. Oklahoma is, after all, landlocked, though I'm sure there are river or lake fish that you could find nearby.

But honestly?

I'm scared of fish.

I like to eat it, hate to cook it.

First, it's expensive. I mean, yes, I buy pretty expensive high quality land animal meat sometimes. But I'm confident in my ability to coax my money's worth out of a steak or chicken breast or pork roast.

But a fish? Not so much. I've ruined too many fishes to be willing to commit much money to their purchase.

However, frozen fish fillets (usually salmon or tilapia) do come in my meat co-op bags periodically.

So I make the DDH cook them.

I have ruined every fish I have ever touched. But he makes a pretty mean salmon, and is pretty handy with a tilapia, too. They're nothing fancy, but they're tasty and simple and fishy (in a good way).

Here's the DDH's super-simple tilapia recipe. But in this category, I definitely welcome other people's suggestions!

Lemon-Butter Tilapia

Heat 2 Tbs. butter and 1 Tbs. fresh lemon juice in a skillet until the butter is melted.

Butter frothing just slightly.

Place your tilapia fillets in the pan.

Fishy fish.

Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

The trick with fish is keeping it from overcooking. Such thin fillets as this take barely two minutes a side. You'll want to flip them as soon as you notice them going opaque at the edges.

Compare this opaque white to the translucent pink of the
uncooked sides in the pictures above.

A fish spatula makes this process much, much easier.

Sprinkle the other side with more salt and pepper.

Continue cooking until done. Again, this will not take long. As soon as it starts flaking apart when you poke it with your spatula, snatch it off the heat. It should be just opaque all the way through, and flaky but still moist.

Opaque, flaky, moist--delicious.

Repeat with any additional fillets, adding more lemon juice and butter as necessary. (The first two he cooked were deliciously lemony; the second two barely lemony at all. I like super lemony fish and he prefers it less lemoned, so that works for us, but you may wish to adjust.)

The second batch, cooked in a hotter skillet, browned some on the edges, which gives it a nice flavor. If you want this browning, make sure your skillet is really hot before putting the first batch in--you don't want to leave your fish on the heat too long trying to get it to brown and end up drying it out and overcooking it.

Browned fish. The weird yellow color is just our heinous
kitchen lighting, but you can see how there are more
browned spots and edges than the batch pictured above.

Serve with vegetables, or perhaps over rice.

A balanced meal.

The other problem with fish? There are never any leftovers. ^_^

Lemony Lentil Salad

I love lentils.

Maybe that's a weird thing to say about this little legume. But it's true. I like the taste and the funny texture.

It's rare to find a food that's cheap, filling, healthy, and tasty, but lentils are all of those.

Dried lentils, like dried beans, are incredibly inexpensive, but they don't require soaking or long cooking times the way their bigger cousins do. So while I have a balance of cheap dried beans and more expensive, convenient canned beans in my pantry, with lentils I just buy dried.

I confess I've been in a bit of a rut cooking lentils, however. I add them to soups and stews to thicken them up, make them more filling and meaty without actually adding more meat. But I rarely do anything else with them.

At five o'clock yesterday afternoon, I had no meat defrosted, the thermometer read100 degrees, and a hungry DDH who needed leftovers for lunch the next day.

A quick perusal of the internets yielded an idea or two, which led to this: a summery cool vegetarian meal that even the DDH enjoyed.

Lemony Lentil Salad.

I told you I love lentils.

Lemony Lentil Salad

Lentils roughly double in volume when cooked. I wanted about three cups cooked lentils, so I measured out 1 1/2 cups dried lentils. This would be an easy recipe to double (or halve) to serve to a crowd (or just yourself).

Lentils.

Put your lentils in a strainer and rinse with hot water. Paw through them and check for little stones or other debris. Alternatively, put the lentils in a bowl, cover with hot water, and drain. The latter method will get them cleaner; the former is quicker and uses fewer dishes.

Rinsing--check for stones and grit.

Put the lentils in an appropriately sized pot and add twice as much water as you did lentils. So for 1 1/2 cups lentils, add 3 cups water. Warm or hot water is better.

You should have way more water than in this picture. I
just barely covered the lentils and had to add more water
almost immediately.

Bring to a boil, then turn the heat down and simmer until done. The lentils will dramatically increase in volume, so add more water if you need to. It will take 15-45 minutes for your lentils to cook, depending on how old and dry they are, how high you keep the heat, etc.

See how much the lentils have risen?

While the lentils are cooking, mix up your dressing.

In a small bowl or a handy shaker thing like I have, add 1/3 cup lemon juice (a bit more than one lemon, unless your lemon is pretty big and juicy). (Tip: Squeeze two (or more) lemons, measure out the juice you need, and pour the rest into an ice cube tray. Freeze and pop out into a labeled bag; pull out whenever you need fresh lemon juice. The lemon juice I'm using is actually frozen leftover lemon juice rather than true fresh juice.)

Lemon juice.

Several sprigs fresh dill or 1+ teaspoon dried dill. Just add some, taste, and add more if necessary.

Dill from the garden.

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard. Or brown mustard of your choice. Or yellow mustard, if you must. Or even some mustard seed or dried mustard, if you're out of the usual condiment.

1/4 teaspoon salt. Add more to taste.

Black pepper to taste.

Mustard, salt, pepper.

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil. (Read instructions below for how to add it to your dressing mixture!)

Olive oil.

Now. If you're using a dressing shaker, you can just layer everything in there and shake vigorously for thirty seconds. If you're using a bowl, you'll want to s l o w l y add the olive oil while constantly whisking the mixture with a fork or whisk. You want your oil and acid to emulsify and turn creamy, not separate into lemon juice with a grease slick.

Pretty layers.

Tasty emulsion.

Chop any vegetables you'd like to add to your salad: tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, summer squash, blanched green beans, steamed broccoli...whatever you have lying around that you think would be tasty.

At some point in here your lentils will finish cooking. Drain the lentils and put into a large bowl.

Lentils.

Add your vegetables. I had a nice juicy red tomato

Summer tomatoes for the win.

and a white onion.

Onion.

Pour on your dressing and stir to combine.

Mix well. Some will pool at the bottom, but you want
to make sure everything is coated.

Serve your lentil salad on top of lettuce, rice, or pasta--or all by itself! This would also make a nice accompaniment to a salmon filet or some other fish.

Delicious and nutritious!

It occurs to me that some parmesan cheese grated on top of that would be divine.

We ate it room temperature last night and chilled for lunch today. I loved it. So good.

And the DDH? We all know that vegetarian recipes have to garner his approval if I want to make them again for general consumption. Luckily, he likes lentils (though not raw onion, oops), and lentils are filling and chewy enough to make up for meat. He ate a big bowl and expressed his approval (except for the raw onions). Success!

Dak Bokkeum Tang (Spicy Chicken Stew)

Chicken soup is for the soul in Korea, too.

I should probably issue a disclaimer here that this isn't actual dak bokkeum tang. A key ingredient in the Korean stew is gochujang, a sauce made of fermented soybeans and chiles.

I stock a lot of Asian ingredients in my kitchen (I find that using an Asian, Mexican, or Italian flavor profile is a good way to turn the exact same dish (pasta, chicken, vegetables, etc.) into a completely different meal), but I did not and never have had any gochujang on hand.

So I improvised. But if you happen to have it or are feeling like a trip to Asia Mart (yes, this is the name of one of the grocery stores in Tulsa. This magical place stocks every imaginable Asian and almost every imaginable Mexican cooking ingredient, plus things like fans and woks and one million pound bags of rice and geisha robes and also the most delicious fresh bubble tea), substitute the soy sauce, fish sauce, and chile paste below with 1/6 cup gochujang + about 1 1/4 Tbs. soy sauce.

The soup as made below is also pretty darn spicy. The DDH's reaction, and I quote, was, "This is spicy! But really good. But spicy!" So caveat ederator.

Dak Bokkeum Tang
Halved and liberally adapted from Cooking Light March 2012

We marinate the chicken for at least a half hour, so bear that in mind when planning. I'm sure the stew would still be tasty if you don't have time to marinate the chicken, but marinating will make the chicken more juicy, tender, and flavorful.

(Why is the noun marinade, with a d, but the verb is marinate, with a t? Has anyone else ever noticed this? I love the English language.)

Measure 2 Tbs. soy sauce. Add 1 Tbs. chile paste (sambal oelek, for example), and then add fish sauce (and/or oyster sauce, and/or any other fun Asiany sauces you have lying around) to make 1/6 cup. Roughly.

Pour into a large bowl (with a lid if you have one).

Add:

• 2-3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 Tbs. ginger, peeled and minced
• 1 Tbs. sesame oil
• 1/2 Tbs. brown sugar
• 3/8 tsp. crushed red pepper

Grating ginger.

A note on ginger: freezing ginger makes it easier to grate with a microplane dealy like in the picture above. If, however, you think this means you can just freeze the whole dang root and chop off pieces as you want it...well, all I have to say is you'd better have a sharp knife, a strong arm, and a lot of patience.

It does, however, stop the damn expensive stuff from rotting before you can use it all. Just saying you might want to chop it into one-inch-ish pieces before freezing, is all.

Marinade

Mix your marinade well with a fork or other favorite mixing implement. Mostly you want to break that brown sugar down and dissolve it into the liquids.

Add ~1 pound chicken tenders (or boneless skinless chicken breasts/thighs/etc. cut into strips or chunks). When the DDH and I went to eat the soup, we realized I should have at chopped the chicken into bite size pieces, as we ended up trying to eat chicken strips with spoons. That did actually work, though, as the chicken turns out tender enough that you don't really need a fork-and-knife.

I've cleverly left the part of the lid the dog chewed on
out of the picture.

Cover and leave to marinate at room temperature for about thirty minutes. If you'll be leaving it longer, you may wish to refrigerate it.

Here's another note: This procedure and time uses white rice. If you're using brown rice, it's going to take longer.

Place 3/4 cup white rice in a medium saucepan. Cover with warm water two inches above rice. Stir the rice; drain. Repeat twice more.

Add 3/4 cup water to drained rice in pan. Bring to a boil, then cover, reduce heat, and simmer for twenty minutes. Remove from heat and let stand ten minutes.

Meanwhile, chop up some vegetables for your stew. I had and thus used potatoes and carrots. If this were summer, there would inevitably be summer squash and zucchini. Sweet potatoes would work, and winter squashes of various sorts; I can picture broccoli and cauliflower in the mix here. Onions, mushrooms--whatever. Chop 'em up.

Two carrots; four medium-small potatoes.

Bring 1/6 cup water to a boil in a large Dutch oven.

Add chicken mixture and bring to a simmer.

Add root vegetables and any other long-cooking vegetables:

Cover, reduce heat, and simmer twenty minutes.

Uncover and simmer ten minutes more or until mixture thickens, stirring occasionally.

At this point I added some frozen spinach:

And left it on the heat until the spinach thawed, then removed from heat and I meant to add green onion tops, sliced, but of course I forgot.

Portion rice into bowls

and top with chicken mixture.

As I said, it is spicy, but warm and delicious. It's somehow a comforting familiar food--chicken and rice soup--yet still a novel and interesting flavor combination.

The bonus to most soups and stews is that they make great leftovers, and this is no exception. I made it Friday night and it was still delicious at lunch the following Thursday.