A Taste Of My Own Medicine

My friend Irene is in Hawaii on vacation and she keeps posting on Facebook about all the Island food and drinks she is enjoying, making me envious and hungry - and making me realize that I did that to others when I was there. I'm getting a taste of my own medicine.

Well, the other day she mentioned that she had enjoyed a fried rice omelet with Spam and that idea resonated so strongly with me that I immediately got out a pan and made some rice, knowing I already had a can of Spam in the pantry. When it was done, I made fried rice with Spam in it, then folded that into an omelet. I have no idea if this is in any way similar to what she ate - there was no photo of her plate in her post - but this is what came to my mind when I read that.

It was good in that down-home-but-not-very-healthy way that Hawaiian food often is. Comfort food if you grew up eating rice and Spam, a little bland but nicely rich and filling. Irene says we must go to the Hukilau restaurant in San Francisco so I can try the real thing without going to Hawaii. Me, I'd rather go.

Fried Rice Omelet with Spam

Filling:

1/2 can Spam, cut into small dice

1 cup cooked white rice

a handful of fresh or frozen peas, about 3/4 of a cup

1/2 onion, chopped

1 celery stick, chopped

1 Tablespoon toasted sesame oil

2 Tablespoons Aloha brand teriyaki sauce (marinade)

This will make enough filling for at least four omelets and perhaps six.

For each omelet:

3 eggs

1 Tablespoon water

1 teaspoon of butter

In a wide frying pan, sauté in the toasted sesame oil the onion, celery and Spam. When onion is soft, add the rice and stir to distribute evenly. Add the fresh peas and cover to let them steam until tender. Add the teriyaki sauce and mix together, letting it all cook for a few minutes. You can stop here and refrigerate the rest if you want, making omelets later. You can add pepper but no salt - both the Spam and the shoyu in the teriyaki sauce will add salt to the dish.

When you are ready to make the omelet, heat the fried rice mixture. In a small bowl, mix together the eggs and the water until well incorporated. Using a small frying pan or omelet pan with a non-stick bottom, add the butter over medium heat until it foams and subsides. Pour in the egg mixture and let it set for a minute or two. Gently lift the edges of the omelet and let the egg in the middle run underneath. When most of the egg is set, add the fried rice mixture, cover and cook for a few more minutes, until the center of the omelet is as firm as you like it.

Slide the edge of the omelet onto a warmed plate, folding the second half of the omelet over onto the first half.

Colorific

What do you do with about a cup of leftover wild rice and 3/4 of 1/4 of a pound of ground pork? Planned overs from two subsequent meals. Whenever I have disparate leftovers, I think of stir fry, since a little of this and a dab of that are what makes a really good stir fry.

Rather than reserve the rice as substrate for the rest, I decided to incorporate it right into the dish, so now it seemed more like fried rice than stir fry, and that's fine with me.

So, here's my latest fried rice version, very colorful and chunky with mushroom slices, broccoli florets, purple cabbage ribbons, beaten egg shreds, carrot ovals, diagonals of green onion, sautéed ground pork with ginger and that nutty, wonderful wild rice, drizzled with just a hint of soy sauce and speckled with a little black pepper.

Quickly sautéed with a modicum of canola oil, it went together fast and retained the beautiful colors. Bumpy, chewy, crunchy and soft, the textures for me were the highlights of the plate. That's one happy pile of goodies!

Strategic Planning

One of the reasons I most love roast chicken is that it makes more than one meal. We enjoy the hot bird fresh from the oven but then my strategy is to make it stretch to several meals.

As case in point, our lumpy chicken from a few nights ago.

The next day for lunch, we had a version of fried rice with chicken bits, leftover rice and a bunch of colorful veggies, simply chopped and fried quick and hot in a combination of butter and canola oil - first the carrots, celery and onion, then the fresh peas, followed by adding the rice to heat, then the meat bits to warm (I also had a single slice of pastrami that I minced and threw in) and finally some green onion before turning it all out onto our plates. I could have added an egg, but it was protein-rich enough as it was. Very tasty and quick.

That night, My Beloved ate a plateful of cold, garlicky chicken with peas while I was out with pal Sari watching Iron Man, a movie he declined in favor of watching a Formula One race on TV.

The rest of the chicken will go into curry to give us yet another delicious dinner and a lunch the next day.

I could even have made the bones into stock but I have a freezer full right now, so I decided that this particular chicken had done her duty. She was buried with honors.

The Rest of the Pig

Chopzilla is just a delicious memory.

The rest of the meat from my chop was sauteed briefly in toasted sesame oil with garlic chips, fresh grated ginger, sliced celery and green onion, broccoli florets and stems, sliced carrots, frozen peas, scrambled egg and, last but not least, nice brown rice.

A sumptuous dinner and there's plenty left over for my lunch.

We drizzled the finished product with some soy and dug in to the rest of the pig.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

When I was a little kid trying to imitate my big sister and older brother, they would mock me with "Monkey see, monkey do!" It made me cry. Lots of things the older kids did made me cry. I'd like to say that my tears made them sorry, but they didn't unless Mom intervened and even then they weren't truly sorry, just sorry they got caught. Such is the tough life of the youngest kid. Heavy sigh.

So, here I am, about 55 years later, still imitating my "big sister," in this case Cookiecrumb, who has been blogging longer than I.

She made fried rice a few days ago (March 22nd) and, as is often the case, I wanted to copy her. Oh, I made a few tweaks because I had different ingredients in the fridge but it's essentially the same. I put in some green garlic, celery, onions, carrot, chopped cabbage, scrambled egg and leftover corned beef from St. Patrick's Day. I fried the veggies by density so they'd all be done perfectly at the same time, starting with the carrots and corned beef, and working my way to the cabbage and lastly the leftover rice. Then I pushed it all to one side in the wide pan I used and poured the egg into the other half, swirling it around until it was just set before cutting it into pieces and mixing it in with the rest of the ingredients. The result was a fun confetti of flavors, but anyone who saw this would chant, "Monkey see, monkey do!" in that nasty sing-song voice the big kids always used.