because i am lazy.

Because I am lazy, I try to make short­cuts in cook­ing. Espe­cially on those days, those dread­ful days that I get off of work two hours too late and come home to a liv­ing room that’s as messy as it was in the morn­ing (can we say hur­ri­cane Ila?). One of those days that I break my key­board by drop­ping my phone on it, ren­der­ing me 6-less (which sucks, because my phone num­ber has a lot of 6s. How am I sup­pose to go online shop­ping with­out a 6?).

Yes, today was one of those days.

Luck­ily for me, my fiancé (ugh, still try­ing to get used to that frou frou word) is a very, very under­stand­ing man, and lets me take the afore­men­tioned short­cuts. Or, in real­ity, he knows how scary I can get when I am tired and hun­gry, so he lets me be.

This is one of those short­cuts that I learned from a Japan­ese TV show that my Dad and I watched a lot when I was in high school. The premise of the TV show was to have an Iron Chef-like match with celebri­ties (usu­ally gravure idols and pop singers) who can’t cook for shit. There was one episode where the girls had to come up with fried rice, and one of the girls was Tai­wanese and busted out a trick that she learned from watch­ing her mother: com­bin­ing the eggs with the rice BEFORE fry­ing. The result was a crumbly fried rice that the judges loved, and the girl ended up cry­ing for joy because she had never, ever received com­pli­ments on her cooking.

Any­how, what I wanted to say is that it’s a good trick. The key is to do it over high heat, and to stir vig­or­ously so that you won’t end up with a rice frittata.

Fried Rice with Edamame, Shiso Leaf, Gar­lic
serves 2

1.5 cups cooked rice
1 egg
1 tbsp garlic-perilla sauce
2 tbsp scal­lions
1/4 cup shelled edamame
peanut oil

I will die with­out gar­lic per­illa sauce, no doubt about that. It makes cook­ing so easy, and all you need is a lit­tle splash to make things fancier. It’s really easy too — just mari­nade per­illa leaves and peeled gar­lic cloves in soy sauce overnight. I always have it in my fridge in an air­tight glass con­tainer, and add com­po­nents as I go. You can use the gar­lic for cook­ing, and eat the per­illa leaves with some rice… But the real gold is the fra­grant soy sauce.

Drop the egg into the rice (cooled).

And then stir until well combined.

Warm up your fry­ing pan to high heat, and splash some peanut oil. Throw in some chopped scallions…

And pour in your egg-rice mix­ture. It’ll clump, but fear not! Just take a plas­tic ladel (or a wooden spat­ula) and stir fry vig­or­ously over high heat.

Even­tu­ally you will get some­thing nice and crumbly like this. Bring down the heat to medium and stir fry in some edamame.

Now move all of your rice to one side and pour in the garlic-perilla sauce (or soy sauce). Let it siz­zle and burn a bit, then move the rice over and stir fry until well combined.

Voila! Nom and enjoy.

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Tagged as: Chinese, recipes