Sunday, May 23, 2004

Is My Blog Burning?
Around the World in a Bowl of Rice

It didn't take me that long to decide on what to make for IMBB day. Rice has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. We ate it for breakfast, lunch, dinner and merienda ("snack") and though there was a veritable bottomless pit of recipes from which I could have chosen, I settled for one of the most basic, and simplest of dishes.

This is my mom's fried rice, which seems to me distinctly a Chinese-Filipino dish: a blend of the filipino sinangag (which has less ingredients but is still yummy) and the more involved Chinese-style fried rice, into which you can literally throw virtually anything: salty fish and bits of crabmeat to roast duck or BBQ-ed roast pork. We ate sinangag in the morning - our version was day-old rice stir-fried with some garlic or shallots in a bit of oil and sprinkled with soy sauce. The breakfast meats were either longanisa (red, fatty filipino sausage) or tocino (another red-cured pork meat).

Mom served this fried rice dish, though, as part of either lunch or dinner. It's an all-in-one meal with your carbs, protein and bit of vegetable, and it was an ideal baon for me as a school lunch.

Ingredients

• About 4-5 cups of day-old jasmine rice (but you can use fresh-cooked rice as well. Also, sticky, calrose rice doesn't work well for this dish.)
• 1 lb. shrimps, beheaded, peeled and deveined
• 2 links chinese sausage (since we got to the States my family has always used the Kam-Yen Jang brand, but other brands will be just fine, I'm sure.)
• 4 eggs, scrambled
• 1/3 cup frozen peas
• Chopped green onion (optional)
• Soy Sauce
• Cooking oil

Sauté shrimps in about 1-2 T vegetable oil; set aside. Do the same for the scrambled egg (breaking up the egg into bite-sized bits), chinese sausage and peas. I'd suggest just frying the egg in the residual oil left from the shrimps and not using any oil at all for the sausage; sauté the peas in the rendered sausage fat as well to cut down on the greasiness. Pour a little more oil into the pan, enough to coat the bottom; add the rice and stir. Sprinkle with some soy sauce to taste and add the rest of the ingredients back into the pot with the rice. Taste, add more soy sauce if necessary, and sprinkle with some chopped green onion, if desired.

Here's to you, Mom!

posted by claudine |Added at 3:10 PM| | is my blog burning, food