fried rice

Holy crap, I'm tired but I wanted to post this fried rice recipe while Bobby's "is this burned rice?" comment was fresh in my head. Yeah, I know my title's not PC. I'M TIRED! I already TOLD you.

Anyway, this rice is better than the soggy crap you get at a lot of mediocre Chinese restaurants even though it just looks like a lot of brown with a few orange spots it in. The green onions really are necessary. We had it for dinner with some weirdly sweet/hot kimchi made of baby vegetables like cabbage and corn and sliced lotus root, which looks really cool.

I listened to a compilation cd that came in the mail last week and I really like the Gogol Bordello track. Maybe I can get Ian to dig up some whole cds of Gogol Bordello. By the way, did you know that Eugene Hutz played a nice Russian boy in Everything is Illuminated? Liev Schreiber directed and wrote the screenplay, Jonathan Safran Foer wrote the book it was based on.

super-fried rice

1 TBSP toasted sesame oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 TBSP fresh ginger, minced or grated
1 lb chuck or 7-bone steak, cut across the grain into strips
superior dark soy sauce from the Asian market
1 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 carrots, sliced
2 cups green cabbage, sliced

2 eggs
3 or 4 green onions, sliced
1 TBSP toasted sesame oil (I buy it by the quart)
3 cups white rice, cooked, leftover, just-made, or from the Chinese take-out

In a wide frying pan (this and eggs are the only things I cook in a non-stick pan) on pretty high heat, fry up the garlic and ginger in the sesame oil. You don't want any burning going on, but don't cry if things get crunchy.

Add the meat and stir it around to brown it pretty quickly - almost HI is the temperature for you. Splurt some soy sauce on to season it and stir for about a half minute more. Dump what's in the pan into a big bowl.

Add a tsp of sesame oil to the pan and let it heat up. Fry the carrots and cabbage on pretty high heat, pretty quickly. They'll get good and brown. Dump them on top of the meat in the bowl.

Whip the eggs in a small bowl with a fork until they're foamy. My mom does this like a demon possessed. Fry them up in the pan, you don't need any extra oil this time. Don't worry that they're ugly and brownish, but don't let them cook too long - they'll cook a little more when you add them to the rice later. Put the cooked eggs in a clean bowl for now. Chop up the green onions and put them with the eggs.

Add the last TBSP of sesame oil to the pan and fry the rice in it for a minute or two. Color it up with soy sauce, adding it gradually and tasting, so you don't make it too salty. Keep frying so that some of the rice gets crunchy - it's better that way and it keeps Bobby entertained with comparing it to burnt foods of all sorts. Dump the stuff from the bowl into the rice and stir it around so everything gets hot. Taste it to make sure you have enough black gold (I think the superior dark soy sauce is black gold, isn't that great?) in there. Stir in the eggs and green onions last.

It might seem boring, but it's delish and makes enough for 6 people to satiate themselves.