Happy meal #28: Ginger fried rice

I’ve never been a fan of fried rice. I know, the horror! It’s just that my impression of fried rice has always been not entirely positive; I am not enamoured of the oiliness, the frozen vegetables used, the dryness. Urghs.

Husband, on the other hand, is all YAY FRIED RICE! He LOVES the stuff. Whenever we go to a zi char stall or a Chinese restaurant, I’m the one ordering hor fun and he’s the one having a plate of fried rice. We’re pretty predictable people. I love noodles, he loves rice.

When I saw this recipe by Mark Bittman, it intrigued me. For starters, it’s really simple and contains none of those frozen veggie crap. Plus, there’s ginger, which is one of my favourite ingredients to cook with. I have a thing for ginger, which husband does not understand.

Anyway, I tried this a few times and I think I’ve got it mastered. Husband gave it the thumbs up and it’s crazy easy to make on a weekday after work. I made some changes to the recipe – the abundant use of sesame oil, replacing leek with onion, added Chinese cooking wine etc.

Can I just say how much I ♥ Chinese cooking wine? The taste and fragrance is amazing. I have been searching for Shaoxing wine high and low in the supermarkets but always come up short so I turned to this as an alternative. It still galls me to see Nigella using Shaoxing wine ALL THE WAY IN ENGLAND and I can’t find it here. What the.

Ginger Fried Rice (adapted from Mark Bittman’s recipe)
Serves two

What you need:

• 2 cups day-old rice, at room temperature
• 3 tablespoons of olive oil
• 4 teaspoons of sesame oil
• 1 tablespoon of Chines cooking wine
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 tablespoon of garlic, minced
• 1 tablespoon of ginger, minced
• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons of soy sauce
• Salt and pepper, to taste

Directions:
Drizzle 1 tablespoon of olive oil and 1 teaspoon of sesame oil into a wok over medium heat. Add ginger and garlic, and fry till everything turns brown and crisp. With a slotted spoon, remove from the wok and stash it onto a plate with paper towel.

Toss in 1 tablespoon of olive oil and 1 teaspoon of sesame oil into the wok. Add the diced onion and Chinese cooking wine, fry until fragrant. Season lightly with salt and pepper. Add rice, cooking till the onion and rice is evenly mixed and the rice is warmed throughout. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Divide rice onto two plates.

Pour the remaining olive oil into a pan and fry up two eggs, sunny-side-up. Try to keep the yolk runny. Put it over the rice.

Drizzle the remaining sesame oil and soy sauce over the two portions and then sprinkle the ginger/garlic mix that you had fried up earlier over everything.