Favourite Foods 3- Fried Rice Paradise

Rice is a staple in the house. The kids like it. Packrat sees it as a comfort food. Steaming hot rice. Most of the time, the kids eat plain rice with steamed something and soup. But we do variations because I figure that if I can't eat plain rice every day with dishes, I shouldn't expect that of the kids.

So, one of the variations is fried rice. Even though fried rice is usually a dish to help clear the fridge of left over food, the kids' fried rice is cooked fresh. The first time we did it, we had grilled lemon grass chicken and used that. That was a hit. Evan had 2 plates and Muffin polished off one bowl by himself. Jordan was blase about it but Jordan is not a good gauge of what is good food.

Anyway, we've repeated it a few times since and it has always been well received. The trickiest bit is doing the lemongrass chicken. This is the chicken that we use to make Vietnamese baguette sandwiches from scratch.

To make the chicken.
Chicken fillet
Kikkoman Light Sauce
Oyster Sauce
Lemongrass
Garlic

*For children, I'd go easy on the Kikkoman and Oyster sauce.
Once chicken is marinated, grill at 180 degrees till cooked. (This is about 20 minutes)
Leave it to cool and then dice. Whether the skin is left on depends on how healthy the dish is meant to be. :)

Before even cooking the chicken, rice should be cooked and cooled. We use a mixture of brown and white rice for this. This is regular rice in our house unless the dish specifically asks for white rice.

Anyway, on top of the rice, what goes into the fried rice is really up to the individual. I enforce the 3 vegetable rule here, even with fried rice.

Carrots
Spinach
Young corn/ Parsnip/Broccoli
Fried omelette for garnishing.
Minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon of salt dissolved in water.
Dark sauce for colouring

Minced garlic fried with olive oil.
Carrots and young corn or whatever hard vegetable is thrown it and sauteed till soft.
If minced pork or raw meat is used, this is the point where it should get tossed in to cook too.
Once all the ingredients are cooked, rice gets tossed in and fried till loose and in separate grains.

I sprinkle salt water over the rice to wet it and give it a bit of flavour. And then I drip a few drops of dark sauce into the rice and mix it in just because the twins like 'brown' fried rice.

I usually add on soup because I grew up having soup at every meal and a meal feels incomplete without soup. The soup in the picture was simple pork rib, carrot and potato soup. Evan thought the soup was a waste of time because it made him go to the toilet more. His words, not mine.
























I really should not blog about their meal recipes before dinner because I get hungry just thinking about it.

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