Whatever it is, Cajun fried rice is today's breakfast.
We had Zataran's "Dirty Rice" for supper last night, with some chorizo and "Irish Banger" sausage I'd had in the freezer. This being Roseholme Cottage, I added some thin-sliced carrot and celery, and, about five minutes before cooking time was up, three shishito peppers. They're generally mild, but one in ten or twenty is a ringer with plenty of heat, and I think I hit the jackpot on one of those three.
It worked out very well. There was plenty left over. I thought about it, and put it up in the fridge for the next morning.
As far as I'm concerned, fried rice is simply a variety of hash: a starch and some odds and ends of this and that, fried up in a pan. I'll make it with left-over Indian-style rice (so good!) and sticky rice from Chinese take-out, so why not Cajun rice?
This morning, I fired up the Always pan-of-all-work, heated it until a drop of water flicked into sizzled and skittered, and poured in the rice. Added a very little soy sauce for luck, and fried and stirred until a lot of the moisture was driven off and it smelled wonderful. Pushed the rice mixture to the sides and scrambled a couple eggs in the middle, keeping the heat high.* You want to make sure the eggs are cooked all the way through -- wet scrambled eggs don't work in fried rice. I sprinkled some dried parsley over the finished dish, and that's all it needed.
______________________
* This is about as harsh a test of non-stick coating as can be. I have had the Always pan since July and have used it frequently since. The coating is still holding up.
That sounds wonderful. Those pre-packaged rice by Zatarains and Tony Cachere sure are easy to cook when time is short and you are 'hongry'.
ReplyDeleteI made some dirty rice last week, adding chopped up kielbasa links for the added protein. Yummy stuff. My wife isn't crazy about so much starch at once, but I don't mind it a bit - ate the entire pan in one sitting.
Have a fantastic Thanksgiving.
I need to learn to wait to read your posts until after I've had breakfast. I wasn't hungry until now.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a variation of breakfasts I had many times while in Korea. Fried rice with eggs over easy on top.
With the street vendors you might get straight fried rice, beef fried rice, pork fried rice or chicken fried rice depending on what they had left over from the night before.
Every culture that uses rice has "Rice with something". dirty rice is Cajun biryani or donburi or whatever, or jambalaya, a mystical term elevated by food snobs to heights way higher than anybody's grandma ever expected it to be. In my authentic Cajun (LeBleu, Lebouef, LeDoux, Fontenot, Benoit) experience, 'jambalaya' was yesterday's roast or sausage and gravy or whatever added to rice and reheated. You can find finely written and editeed recipes with ingredients no authentic Cajun kitchen would ever have, all lumped together in a multi-step preparation to make a dish called 'dirty rice' or 'jambalaya' or you can look in the fridge, see leftover meat, maybe a little gravy, and say, "Hmmm, with a pot of rice..."
ReplyDelete