Chicken Fried Rice

One of my favorite things that I've learned from my foray into cooking is that recipes are not, in fact, written in stone.

Shocker, right?

At first, like everything else I did in the kitchen, I was hesitant. How would I know what herbs are better than others, or what would make a better substitute for what? Well, that's what taste buds are for, or so I've heard.

By the way: guess what? Your mom was right - taste buds do change! For example, five years ago, I could not stand the thought of eating an avocado. Now, I can't get enough of them. I put them in salads or stuff chicken with them, or I could just eat a whole avocado by myself, or put guacamole on everything.

Yum.

Anyway, this affirmation of Recipes Are Not Written In Stone has definitely led to me being more adventurous, and it even helped me make tonight's dish a little more interesting.

Before I get into my actual recipe, I want to show those who are beginners what mise en place is:

Mise en place is a French culinary term meaning "everything in place", or, "lay out all of your ingredients before you start to cook so you're not running around like a chicken with its head cut off". Read your recipe, find out how much of everything you're going to need - and whether it's sliced, diced, chopped, pitted, etc - and separate them into prep bowls (I like to use paper plates, though, because then I can just throw them out. I know, I know, not very green of me...). Mise en place also includes your equipment. Does your oven need to be preheated to 350? Are you going to need a small saucepan as a well as a large skillet, or your blender? Make sure everything is out and ready to use.

Well, now I have my mise en place, let's take a look at this recipe:


CHICKEN FRIED RICE
courtesy of Cook This, Not That:

YOU WILL NEED....
1 tbsp peanut or vegetable oil
4 scallions, green & whites separated, chopped
1 tbsp grated fresh ginger
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 carrots, diced
2 cups bite sized broccoli florets
2 cups mushrooms (shiitake), stems removed and sliced
1 medium zucchini, diced
1/2 lb boneless, skinless chicken thighs, sliced into thin, bite-sized pieces
4 cups cooked brown rice
2 tbsp low-sodium soy sauce
2 eggs, lightly beaten.


FACT: I loathe mushrooms. That is one food that will never touch my magical ever-changing taste buds.
FACT: There was not a single zucchini to be found in Shop Rite. Are they even in season? Is that why I couldn't find them? I should look into that. Well, I don't really care for zucchini to begin with, so it's no great loss.

Okay, as you can probably see from my mise en place, peanut or vegetable oil is absent from the lineup. Instead, I'm using sesame oil.

It runs about $9 a bottle and 120 calories per tablespoon. This delicious oil is made, as you might have guessed, from sesame seeds, which are packed with antioxidants. I didn't want to go out and buy peanut oil just for this one dish, and my vegetable oil is on reserve for making tortilla chips tomorrow, so sesame oil it is. I think it will add a delicious flavor without being too overpowering.

Also, I'm changing the chicken thighs to chicken breasts; I'm omitting the mushrooms and the zucchini and instead adding some fresh snow peas.

Now, onto cooking!

First, Cook the brown rice. Follow the directions on the package. Mine took 40 minutes on the stove.

While the brown rice cooks, prepare your ingredients! Peel, chop, dice, mince, etc!

I decided to peel and grate the ginger first. If you've never seen a ginger root before, only the slimy pink stuff that's served alongside sushi, it's the item in the mise en place that looks like a mandrake:

The good thing about ginger root is, it can be frozen. So go ahead and buy a whole thing of it. Cut off a bit of it, throw the rest in a baggie and shove it in the freezer.

 

Then I moved onto the other veggies. The carrots, garlic, and scallion whites (set aside the scallion greens for later). NOTE: For this recipe I used frozen chopped broccoli to save me time and energy. The stir-fry method cooks it off quickly!

Next, I cut up the chicken breasts into bite-sized chunks. Now, if it's one thing I cannot stand, it's touching raw chicken. I just can't do it. If you're like me, invest in some culinary gloves. You can find them your local supermarket. Or, if you know someone in the culinary industry, ask them to steal a box for you.

Lastly, I beat the eggs. Poor eggs, they didn't do anything to deserve it (yuk-yuk-yuk).

 

By now, your brown rice should be ready. Measure out 4 cups, set aside in a bowl. Resist the urge to gobble it up right away. 

Now the fun begins! Here's what you gotta do:

1. In a wok or a large nonstick skillet, heat the oil over medium-high heat. When the oil is lightly smoking, add the scallion whites, ginger and garlic. Cook for 30 to 45 seconds.

 

2. Add the carrots, broccoli, mushrooms (if using), zucchini (if using) and snow peas (if using), and cook for 4 to 5 minutes, using a spatula or wooden spoon to stir the vegetables throughout.

3. Add the chicken and continue cooking for 2 to 3 minutes, or until the pieces are no longer pink.

4. Stir in the rice and soy sauce, and cook for another 5 minutes, allowing the rice to get crispy at the bottom.

Here is where I ran into a little problem. As you can see, I don't own a wok and my "large skillet" is only 10". As you can also see, the large skillet was getting pretty full and the contents were getting hard to stir around, threatening to spill over the sides. So, I made a quick decision. I heated up a second tablespoon of sesame oil in a second 10" skillet, and poured the rice in there, then added the soy sauce. 

5. Create an empty space in the middle of the pan and add the eggs. Use a spoon or spatula to quickly scramble the eggs until light and fluffy, then stir them into the rest of the ingredients.

While the rice and eggs were being cooked separately, once the chicken was cooked all the way through in the other skillet, I added a tablespoon of soy sauce, covered it and turned off the heat. Then, once the rice and eggs were done, I took the biggest serving bowl I had, and dumped into it the contents of both skillets. Then, I mixed everything together.

6. Serve garnished with scallion greens and an extra sprinkling of soy sauce, if desired!

*whew* 

The end result was delicious, if I do say so myself. The sesame oil added unexpected flavor and the fresh snow peas were crunchy and sweet. My fiance claimed it reminded him of his favorite Chinese restaurant, which to me was the highest compliment I could ever hope to get.

As for doing anything differently ... I'm getting a wok! Doing things in two skillets was a little hectic, but unavoidable.

Well, this was my first recipe post! HUZZAH! I hope you learned and I hope you've been inspired. Thanks to my fiance for the photographs, even though he made me nuts with his tripod in the kitchen. Tell me: did you like the pictures? Should there be more or less of them? Does the recipe sound like it would be easy to follow? Give me some feedback, I'd love to hear it! 

Stay tuned for tomorrow's special New Year's Eve edition!: 7-Layer Dip & Homemade Tortilla Chips!

I Think, Therefore I Nom

Welcome. If you've stumbled across my little blog, it means that I've either shoved it in your face and said, "LOOK AT MY BLOG!" or you're a genuinely curious stranger with a shared passion for eating. In that case, double welcome for not being threatened. You seem normal. Please stay. Have you tried the bean dip?

Let's get started.

For as long as I can remember, I have been one of two things: a fat chick and an alien in the kitchen. How can this be? Well, it's quite simple. You see, I grew up with two culinary professionals as parents. They owned a bakery for a number of years, peddling my mother's famous rugelach. After they sold the bakery, over the years Dad worked for several giant food corporations that included Drake's Cakes, Manhattan Bagel and Villa Pizza. He passed away suddenly in 2008. After teaching aerobics for some time, Mom owned and operated and cooked for her own vegetarian restaurant for nine years before working as a culinary instructor. She is now a paralegal.

Now, when you grow up with chefs for parents (or parents for chefs), you become their guinea pig. Almost every time you walk into the kitchen, you're being handed a spoon or a fork and ordered to "taste this." Dinner was not just dinner, it was a foodie's delight! Childhood friends begged dinner invitations! In our garage was a freezer full of delicious experimental goodies - everything from mini chocolate eclairs to shredded pork in barbecue sauce. It was no shock when by high school I was a size 14! My father used to say he sacrificed his body for his art - I think mine was sacrificed for his art, too!

Another pitfall of having chefs for parents is you become utterly useless in the kitchen. Well, you do if you're a lazy ass like me. Whenever my mom would try to show me something, I would always shrug it off or laugh and say, "No use in me learning this stuff now! Not when I always have YOU to cook for me!"

Oh, how wrong I was.

In early 2010, at the ripe old age of 22, I was a year into a relationship with my current fiance and facing a very scary thing: moving out on my own. I had a mild panic attack, sure - because I was going to be expected to cook.

Game over. No more Mommy in the kitchen. No more coming home to a hot meal. No more fancy-pants dinners. Surely, I would starve to death.

So, I started, tentatively,  to venture into the kitchen. It was very tentative. I scoured the interwebz for easy recipes. I refused to touch any recipe that involved roasting, grilling or sauteing. I would not consider working with any main ingredients other than pasta or chicken (it would be seven months before I attempted to roast a pork loin).

My God, I thought, I'm never coming out of this alive. I'm doomed to spend the rest of my life eating instant mac and cheese and Lean Cuisine!

But, like the light at the end of the tunnel, I faced my fear in September 2010. I moved in with the boyfriend and became...a decent cook.

It was rough at first. The first few weeks we were living together, simplistic recipes ruled the roost. I made pasta and sauce. I made chicken marinated in lemon pepper. I made meat loaf. Once we got a little crazy and made steak stir-fry, using pre-sliced pieces of steak from Shop Rite. I still didn't want to try anything too complicated or convoluted. Recipes with too many steps made my head spin. I decided, finally, that enough was enough. I needed to man up. I found a recipe book: Cook This, Not That, by those geniuses David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding.

Their introduction was soothing, like a mother's touch or sinking into a warm, hot bath:

"Come with us to a magical place. It's a place of comfort and ease, a place where you're in control and no one can tell you what to do. It's a place where you can be as inventive, creative, and wacky as you want, and everything you do is perfectly alright. And best of all, it's a place where you can eat all your favorite foods and still lose all the weight you want. Indeed, this place is so magical, you can not only lose weight and eat great but also grow wealthier and healthier, just by spending more time there. So, what is this magic place? It's your kitchen."

Suddenly, it all came clear. They understood me. They didn't want me to be afraid of the kitchen, they wanted me to love it. I wanted to take this book, crawl into bed with it, and die there. I had found my bible.

Slowly but surely, I came out of my culinary shell. I quickly realized, as I skimmed through the delicious recipes in this mystical tome, that I had been aiming high. So what if I can't whip up a brisket or roast a turkey right out of the gate? So what if the thought of cooking fish makes me frozen with fear? SO WHAT?! I'll tell you what! I AM GOING TO BE THE BEST DAMN COOK THAT I CAN! AND AS GOD AS MY WITNESS, I'LL NEVER BE HUNGRY AGAIN!!!

*ahem*

Thanks to that one book, I became a cooking machine. I was on the internet every day looking for bigger and better recipes with more varied tastes. I placed phone calls to my mother about the best cuts of meat for a French pot roast and what's a fair price for a pound of catfish? One night, my fiance and I made a trip to the 24 hour Wal-Mart because we decided, at 10pm, that we needed a blender right stat now. With that blender I began to make my own pesto and my own guacamole  (not to mention learning how to make my own tortilla chips to dip into my own guacamole). When my fiance's sister gave us a crock pot for Hanukkah this year, I nearly sobbed with joy. The slow cooker dinners are churned out at least once a week now.

As recently as yesterday, my dearest friend suggested that I start a blog. What would I write about? I asked her. She threw out a few suggestions, which were good, but deep down, I knew that the only thing I could write about would be the one thing that I love more than anything: food.

It reminds me of the film Julie & Julia:

Paul and Julia Child, played exquisitely by Stanley Tucci and Meryl Streep respectively, are sitting in a little Parisian cafe. Julia does not want to be a bored housewife and declares that she must find something to do. Paul asks her what she likes to do. Her response: "Eat!" I think we all know what that lead to for Mrs. Child.

Whether or not this exchange actually happened, I don't know and I don't care. But I'm unemployed and bored, and I love to eat. So, like Julia Child, I'm turning that into something. This is my blog: Cogito Ergo Nom ("I think, therefore I nom", taken from the phrase coined by Jeph Jaques, artist and author of Questionable Content). At least three nights a week, I vow that I am going to come on here to recount my culinary adventures, both good and bad, successes and failures. I will include pictures. My goal is to show those who are "culinary challenged" (and myself) that no matter how old you are or what your level of experience is, the kitchen is, in fact, your friend!

Tomorrow night: chicken fried rice!