Ham Fried Rice

Fried rice is my go-to for quick weeknight dinners. It's super duper easy, I always have the ingredients on hand, and it's pretty tasty. My fried rice is totally not the greasy Chinese take-out version, but I love it so much. I crave it. 

For the rice, you can either used leftover rice, you can throw some rice on to boil when you get home from work, or you can even pop into the takeout place on the way home and grab a little carton of cooked rice. Don't judge, but I have a secret. I'm in love with Trader Joe's microwavable frozen individual brown rice packets. It seems more like real food than some of those other pre-cooked rice packets. And I love the nutty flavor and toothsome chew of brown rice. I try to keep peas in the freezer at all times too. Not only are they perfect for tossing into rice, but also pasta! And I mean, got a black eye or sore muscle? Instant ice pack! Can I tell you another secret? I also keep un-cooked bacon in the freezer, and then when I make fried rice, I just cut off a few chunks from the frozen slab o' bacon and throw it in. Add an onion, garlic, egg, some soy sauce, and lots of black pepper… and that, my friends, is dinner.

With Easter just around the corner, I thought this would be the perfect time to talk about fried rice, since you can totally throw some of that leftover Easter ham in there. Yep, Easter-ham fried rice. It's a thing. At my house anyway. And if you bake your ham with brown sugar, oh man. That sticky sweet sugary ham is puh-erfect in fried rice. I would even go as far as to recommend stashing a hunk or two of ham from your guests just for this purpose. You'll thank me later. 

Ham Fried Rice

Serves 2-4

Unlike some fried rice recipes, I like to mix the raw egg in with the rice, so that it almost coats it and cooks all around it, versus having chunks of scrambled egg. Check out my 'technique' in the instructions. 

2 large eggs

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 tablespoon coconut oil

1/2 large yellow onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 cup frozen peas

1 cup cooked, diced ham

3 cups cooked rice

Fresh ground black pepper

Sriracha

In a small bowl, add eggs and soy sauce, and beat until combined. Set aside.

Heat a large non-stick skillet or wok over medium-high, and add coconut oil. Once the oil is shimmery, add the onion. Cook onion until just starting to brown, about 5-6 minutes. Add garlic and cook for another couple of minutes minutes (don't let garlic burn). Add peas and ham, and cook for a minute or so, until warm. Add rice and stir so everything is combined and rice is warm. 

Push rice mixture to outer edges of the wok and pour the egg in the middle. Let it sit for a minute or so, so that it's starting to cook on the bottom but is mostly still liquid, then start stirring, mixing the cooked egg into the raw egg. Slowly start stirring the edges of the rice into the egg mixture, until eventually there's no longer a well in the middle of the wok. Stir until everything is combined. Then sort of flatten the rice out, let cook for a few minutes, and flip it (with a spatula). Flatten once more and cook for another minute or so. This ensures that the egg is cooked, and it makes a nice crispy crust. 

Season to taste with black pepper and sriracha. I love lots of black pepper in mine! 

A Match Made in Mango

Some things just don’t taste good together. Consider exhibit one: the Full House episode where little Michelle Tanner, eager to earn a Honeybee badge, creates ‘recipes’ by combining her favorite foods…things like tuna and ice cream, or maybe it was Oreos. And what about the ol’ no cheese with seafood rule? Sure, like all rules, there are exceptions (for instance, tuna cheddar melt…not tuna ice cream melt though) but for the most part, a light, fresh fish does not benefit from the sharp, salty, overpowering mustiness of cheese. I don’t think it takes a great chef, or even a good home cook to figure out what combinations absolutely do not work. But does it take a great culinary genius to figure out what flavors do go together?

I was having one of those ‘feel sorry for myself’ days last week, and to cheer myself up I did what most great women do—I bought myself something (spare me the feminist rant… you know a new pair of shoes makes you feel better every time!). Instead of a fabulous new pair of shoes, or a purse, or bath soaps, or another favorite pick-me-up, vodka, I bought myself a book. This book. The Flavor Bible. This giant text book sized mammoth of a book is supposed to be everything its title describes it to be… the bible of flavor combinations. It’s supposed to be a beacon of inspiration for the amateur cook all the way up to the restaurant chef de cuisine. Pages, upon pages, upon pages of flavor combos. Want to know what pairs well with artichokes? Refer to the bible. How about figs? Check the bible. Quail? Bible. It’s all in there.

But… really, corn and salt go well together!? Get outta here! And cinnamon and apples? Who knew!? From my initial thumbing of the Bible’s pages, I’m feeling a little bit like I spent $35 to learn that umbrellas and rain go together. That being said, I want to give the book another chance. I’m hoping my reading thus far was too brief to fully appreciate the nearly 400 pages of flavor pairings. If the book works like it’s supposed to, maybe one of these days I’ll have turbot in my shopping cart, and I’ll make a fabulous fish-dish based on the Bible’s suggested pairings. Or maybe I’ll see something crazy and foreign to me at the Farmer’s Market, like purslane, and I’ll feel confident that the book will guide me in it’s usage (pairs well with green beans, in fact). Or maybe it will simply give me the inspiration I need to get dinner on the table, when I have a cupboard full of uninspired odds and ends (neither ice cream or oreos pair well with Tuna, according to the Bible).

For the time being, however, I think that I’m doing just fine putting flavors together on my own. I mean, if I can get Evan to eat brown rice AND mango, I must be doing something right! We had a simple semi-homemade dinner last night that Evan actually devoured, despite his affinities to the aforementioned items. Black bean mango chicken over green chili brown rice.

The juicy tart mango chunks combined with grilled cumin-spiced chicken, (a can of) black beans, and red onion slivers served over (a microwave packet of) brown rice mixed with (a can of) green chilies and a splash of pineapple juice provided a perfect balance of sweet, salty, and savory. And I didn’t need a book to tell me that…one Honeybee badge, coming right up!