Sorry, No Recipe
Tonight I made the best fried rice I have ever made. That’s what I did with the 3/4 pound of thin pork.
What really seemed to “make” the batch of fried rice was the use of green pepper and Vidalia onion I’d bought on the way home, not knowing they’d get used that way. While I was cutting the pork into little pieces, some onion and pepper, diced small, were cooking in butter on low heat. It wasn’t too different from the way I’d start out if I were making the sweet & sour pork dish my mother and sister used to make. Then some black pepper, garlic powder, red pepper, celery salt and especially powdered ginger and the meat, stirred enough to coat the meat somewhat. Covered and partially cooked, stirred/flipped the meat and added a couple teaspoons or so of brown sugar, cooked until done and a bit more to cook off a little of the liquid.
Piled the pork mixture to one half of the pan, added butter, added the rice, spritzed with some soy sauce, mixed slightly, then broke two eggs onto the rice, mixed that in, more soy, pulled the pork into the rice, mixed it up, a little more soy and I think I added another shake of ginger. Dumped in probably a cup of frozen peas, mixed those in, then did a series of cook covered a while, stir, cover and cook more, enough so thre are a couple or so instances where some of the bottom rice browns.
Damn, it was tasty. And potent, but without any overt taste of being “spicy.” If that makes any sense.
We’d actually decided just to cook the pork as a meat dish, with sides of rice and veggies. Deb thought I was attached to the idea of fried rice, though, and pre-cooked the rice to encourage me to do that. That worked out great.
The sad thing is, try as I may to duplicate it, the stuff will never turn out the same again, even if it somehow is just as tasty. This happens when I make what we’ve dubbed “random chicken.” Which implies it’s never the same, but it came out so perfect a couple weeks ago that I tried to repeat the flavor combination and failed. In fact, the attempt to repeat the super batch resulted in a merely acceptable batch, just from not getting the spice mix exact and having a smaller quantity of chicken. So I went back to random after that. Basically it’s chunks of chicken, cooked in butter and/or oil (started experimenting with olive oil, which really changes how the flavors carry and how it browns), with some combination of some or all of black pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, red pepper, ginger, sage, rosemary, and savory. I started leaving out the celery salt as I started experimenting with the last three on the list. Sage seems to lose its flavor, or impart a bad flavor, if added too early and cooked to much, but done right it makes the chicken especially complementary with chicken Rice-a-Roni, which is heavily sage flavored. Savory has become my latest favorite, and seems more subtle than the sage. But I digress.
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