Happy New Year everyone! I hope your 2018 is going well. I am by no means a professional chef and I'm not claiming to be an amazing cook. Baking is more my thing really. However, sometimes I do get the urge to try my hand at something that is not pasta or mashed potatoes. So welcome to The Cooking Trials.

Today's installment features Vegetable Fried Rice.

Ingredients:

• 1 Cup rice
• 1 Onion
• 1 green sweet pepper
• 1 tomato
• Broccoli
• 1 Carrot
• Salt
• Paprika
• Curry
• Lemon pepper seasoning
• Black pepper
• Garlic powder
• Italian seasoning
• Basil leaves
• Soy sauce
• Teriyaki sauce
• Ketchup
• Worcestershire sauce
• Butter

Process

• First, I measured out roughly a cup of rice and set it to cook. Generally, people tend to use a 1 : 2 ratio of rice to water. I tend to eyeball it because I can’t be bothered to measure outside of baking but unless you’re practiced and familiar, don’t be like me. Be better than me. I tend to like firmer rice, so to avoid accidentally making a rice-like mush, I use 1 ½ cups water to rice and then add as needed while it cooks. I then added a teaspoon of basil leaves and Italian seasoning, a tablespoon of butter and half a teaspoon of salt. I start the rice on medium heat and periodically check to make sure it hasn’t lost all the water and started to burn. Cause that’s counterproductive when my stomach is crying and 4 5 seconds from eating itself.

• While the rice was cooking, I started on the vegetables. I washed and chopped the broccoli and carrots and put them to soak in some room temperature water. I do this for no reason other than that sometimes they smell really strongly of whatever they get sprayed with. Next, I deseeded and chopped the sweet pepper and the tomato. Finally, I chopped the onion. (And cried a small lake. I’m actually posting this from a pool float in the middle of my living room.)

• Some time between me violently shoving aside the chopped onions and trying to stop my tears, the rice finished. I gave it a few stirs to make sure none of it had stuck to the pan and then moved the pan off the heat. I then took a frying pan (because I was really trying to limit the amount of dishes I used - professional chefs, cooking enthusiasts and food police do not come for me for… pan etiquette or something) and set some water to boil with salt and about a tablespoon of butter. (It’s actually not butter. It’s some sort of spread that I’ve called butter my entire life and only recently found out I had been deceived. I was shook. Although, the packaging doesn’t actually say it’s butter. It says spread so…) When the water came to a boil, I tossed in the broccoli florets and stems and the carrots and covered them for about 5 minutes. I then took them out with a slotted spoon to drain the water and placed them in a bowl.

• Then came the most fun part. The frying. I just like hearing things sizzle. I don’t know. Don’t judge me. Anyway, I placed the now empty frying pan back over medium heat (and waited for some of the remaining moisture to dry out) and added another tablespoon of “butter”. At the sweet sound of the “butter” sizzling in the pan, I dropped in the chopped onions and let them cook for around 4 to 5 minutes before adding in the sweet pepper and the tomato. I let that cook for another 3 minutes then added some soy sauce and turned the heat down a little. I let that go for as long as I possibly could without ruining my hope for dinner as I reveled in the aggressive hissing of the pan. Pulling myself together, I added the broccoli and carrots and then added:

  • ½ a teaspoon of cumin
  • 1 teaspoon of curry
  • 1 teaspoon of paprika
  • 1 teaspoon of lemon pepper seasoning
  • ½ teaspoon of garlic powder
  • ½ teaspoon of black pepper
  • an eyeballed amount of teriyaki sauce, ketchup and Worcestershire sauce

• After mixing that together, I folded in the cooked rice until everything was well combined.

And that was it my friends. Again, I don’t claim to be a professional, or even an exceptional cook. I just like to try things sometimes. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t. I quite liked the way this one turned out. And I know, I know - it’s vegetable rice, it’s not even that hard. But I really only got the hang of cooking rice about two months ago.

Feel free to try this out for yourselves OR share your own favourite way to do veg rice. Until next time!