Kitchen Sink Fried Rice

(this was an outtake pic…but Kai’s face in the background cracks me up!)

Growing up Jamaican we ate a lot of rice & peas at dinner so I’m excited to partner with Success® Rice for this post. Rice was a side dish almost every single night. My friend Rich in high school is Hatian and said his mom would even serve him rice with spaghetti! (I think I believed him at the time, but now seems just too weird to be true.)….Random…in another conversation with Rich I remember him telling me how he wished rice was just one big grain that he could eat with a knife and fork instead of tons of tiny rice grains…I remember thinking he was nuts because I could literally eat it for breakfast lunch and dinner… and plain too..with just butter or gravy only. (don’t judge me!) Thinking back I wonder how many rice conversations I had with that kid…. #growingupcaribbean. My cousin Arielle eats rice with just italian dressing. I think that’s one of her comfort foods.

Anyway, we now eat a fairly low carb diet as you know so we don’t have rice as a daily side dish. What I do now is have quinoa as an alternative and make rice special for carb days  and…when I just want comfort food at a certain time of the month. My two go to recipes are rice & peas with coconut, Caribbean style, and fried rice Asian style.

I normally use brown rice, but the last two times I made it, I used Success® Jasmine Rice. It has a nutty fragrance that I liked (and the kids did too) and a smooth texture. I liked switching things up with the aromatic rice!

The secret to kickass fried rice is making sure your rice is cold before frying it up. After cooking the rice, I popped it in the freezer to cool since I didn’t have time to let it chill out overnight in the fridge. It worked just perfectly. Plus Success® Jasmine Rice cooks up in just 10 minutes so I had a lot of time for it to sit in the freezer to cool down. It cooks in a pre-portioned bag so it made it extra easy with no mess from transferring from pot to bowl.

My fried rice should be called kitchen sink fried rice, because I tend to make it with any and everything we have bits of in the fridge and pantry. The last time I had random bean sprouts, some diced up left over pork loin, random veggies… suffice to say it’s a good dish to use-up the odds and ends from your week. Of course, me being me…when I made it I forget to take pics along the way to share so for the first time in a long time we had “kitchen sink fried rice” two weeks in a row. Below is the recipe of the second batch.

I first searched the fridge and diced up everything that would be yummy in the dish while the kids were having a snack.

My sous chef Rohan helped me make the rice and I popped it in the freezer.

This week the kitchen sink fried rice only had onions, kimchi, cilantro, garlic and eggs, but it was delicious.

I heat some stir fry oil (it has a garlic flavor) in the pan and add fresh onions and garlic to soften.

Then I throw the rice in and season it up (I use pepper, 5 spice, soy sauce, ginger, lime).

I throw in whatever veggies I’ll be including at this point, and slide everything over to fry/scramble the eggs all in the same pan.

Mix it all together and add the kimchi last so it still has some bite to it when served. I season again at this point just to make the flavors balance how we like it.

(Sometimes I’ll just buy a packet of fried rice seasoning to save time but I still have to tweak that)

Kaya is my adventurous eater. She ate that fried rice with no questions asked.

Rohan … not so much. The first batch from the other week (that I forgot to take pics of) he picked out the rice to separate it from the meat and the veggies and only ate the rice! It was a mess. So this time, I fried him up a separate little batch of Jasmine rice in the garlic oil with a little bit of soy sauce  and lemon (and a regular scrambled egg on the side) so he could have something plainer but still connected to the recipe everyone else was eating. If you’re interested in recipe ideas, special offers and more, join the Recipe Club®http://bit.ly/1RDuJ2b.

 

What’s your go-to rice dish?

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Success® Rice. The thoughts, feelings, recipe and cute kids are all mine!