Casual Kitchen: March 2007

How to Make Fried Rice

This post contains simple instructions on how to make fried rice. This recipe is so easy and so laughably cheap that I just have to share it with the world. It dates back to my college days when a friend of mine named Tracy taught it to me. Money was tight back then, so needless to say this recipe instantly entered my heavy rotation--and it's been there going on 17 years now.

But the best thing about this meal is that it costs less than one dollar to make. Seriously.

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Fried Rice

Ingredients:
1 frozen sausage link (either sweet or spicy Italian-style sausage)
Two cups (roughly) of day-old rice (best if made the day before in a rice cooker: here's one to consider)
Soy sauce
1 egg, beaten
Tabasco and/or cayenne pepper to taste
Frozen peas (can also use other frozen green veggies, like broccoli)

Directions:
1) Slice up the sausage link into small chunks and fry on medium heat in a non-stick pan.

2) Add the rice. Be sure you break up any clumps of rice. You can add cayenne pepper to the rice if you want a spicier dish.

3) Crack egg into a glass and beat with a fork. I add a few good splashes of Tabasco to the beaten egg.

4) Add egg/Tabasco mixture to the rice and sausage in the pan. Stir with a spatula until combined evenly.

5) Shake four or five healthy splashes of soy sauce onto the egg/rice mixture (err on the side of caution here and don't add too much or the dish will be too salty--you can always add more soy sauce later if need be).

6) Turn burner up to medium-high. Continue stirring constantly and be careful not to let the rice burn.

7) Dump in a couple of handfuls of frozen peas. Cook for another 4-5 minutes more on high heat, stirring constantly.

Serves two.

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Related Posts:
Mock Wild Rice: An Insanely Easy To Make Side Dish
Eight Tips to Make Cooking At Home Laughably Cheap: The Economics of Cooking, Part 2
Two Useful Cooking Lessons From Another Cheap and Easy Side Dish
How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking With Five Easy Questions

I can't end this post without backing up my "less than one dollar" claim. So here it is: you can buy an entire pound bag of frozen peas for $1.50 and you'll use just a handful or two per batch (you can of course use other types of veggies, I just like peas because they're easy to handle and keep well in the freezer). You can buy an entire package of a dozen Italian-style sausage links for $3-4. You're going to use about 5-10c worth of rice. Add in an egg at $2.29 a dozen and a few splashes each of soy sauce and Tabasco, and here's how the math works:

Peas--------------------------15-20c
Sausage, 1 link--------------33c
1 Egg-------------------------19c
Rice--------------------------10c (at most)
Tabasco, Soy Sauce--------10-15c (again, at most)
Total-------------------------87-97c

I knew that MBA would pay off eventually...!

If you're looking for other inexpensive recipes like this one, you can visit here, here and here.

Cooking, Simplified by Wall Street

This is just a brief post about a conversation I had with Laura on a Saturday morning a number of years ago.

Maybe “conversation” is the wrong word to describe it, as you’ll soon find out.

It’s the best single illustration of how my career on Wall Street forced me to simplify my approach to cooking. I guess at that point in my career I was able to handle making only a finite number of choices and decisions over the course of a week. And when I exceeded that finite number, I would start to come a little bit unhinged mentally:

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Decisions, Decisions

Laura: Dan, I think I'm going to make a pie today!
Dan: Great! Cool.
L: What kind of pie do you think I should make?
D: I don't know. Whatever pie you want to make.
L: Should I make a blueberry pie?
D: Okay.
L: Or how about a peach pie?
D: Sure that sounds great.
L: Or how about a cherry pie?
D: Okay.
L: Hmmm, maybe a blueberry pie would be better. But a peach pie sounds good too.
D: Uh-huh.
L: Or how about this....a cherry pie, but with peaches in it!
D: Ehhh. I don't know.
L[In an increasingly excited voice]: Hey, how about a peach pie with blueberries in it?
D: Uh... I don't know.
L: Or what do you think about a blueberry pie with peaches in it?
D: Idon'tknowIdon'tknowIdon'tknowIdon'tknow--I DON'T KNOW!!!! [At this point, I either whimpered or let out a little girly scream, I really don't remember which. ]
L: Whoa.
D: Woo. Uh, sorry. I guess I just couldn't handle all those choices there. I've been making a lot of difficult decisions over the past few days.
L: You've gotta get the hell out of Wall Street, you know that?
D: Yeah, wow. I guess you're right.

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I share this "conversation" with you to show why, from this point on, I sought out ways to simplify my cooking--and everything else in my life for that matter.

This is why in this blog you'll see so many examples of simplifying and modifying recipes, and why I’m always on the lookout for different examples of really easy dishes to cook. It also explains why I’m always looking for ways to get faster at cooking and why I look for ways to judge recipes before I cook them.

I sincerely hope you're not the type of person who wigs out on a Saturday morning after one or two too many pie questions. :) But I hope you enjoy and benefit from my advice and suggestions all the same.

Goulash Soup!

I saw another particularly promising recipe the other day in the Wall Street Journal. Again, who would ever guess that the WSJ would be a place for reliable recipes? What happened to all the rich fat cats who are supposed to be running that paper? ;)

I've made a number of changes to the recipe, both to simplify it and eliminate some steps, and I present my adapted version of it to you below. If you want to see another example of recipe modification, be sure to take a look at the original. In my opinion, both versions pass the five easy questions with flying colors.

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Goulash Soup
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 large onion diced

3 cloves garlic, minced
3 Tablespoons sweet paprika
1 Tablespoon ground caraway seeds (NOTE: if you're stuck with plain, unground caraway seeds, you can use a simple spice grinder like this one, or you can painstakingly smash the seeds with the back of a heavy spoon in a heavy bowl. OR, if you don't have a spice grinder and don't want to have to buy one, you can do the expedient thing and just leave these guys out. The dish is still good without 'em.)
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 bay leaf

1 pound lean beef chuck or stew meat, in 1/2 inch cubes

1 Tablespoon tomato paste
1 Tablespoon red-wine vinegar

1/2 pound potatoes, unpeeled and diced in 1/2 cubes
Juice of 1/2 lemon

Freshly ground black pepper

In a large non-stick pan, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the onions and saute for 4 minutes. Then add the garlic, spices (paprika, carroway seeds, marjoram and thyme) and stew meat. Saute until beef begins to brown, another 4-5 minutes.

Add the tomato paste, vinegar and 4 cups water. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 30 minutes.

Add the potatoes. Simmer for 30 minutes or until the potatoes are tender. Before serving, add the lemon juice and season to taste with black pepper.

Easily serves four.

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Congrats again to the Journal for putting another great recipe out there for me to adapt and bend to my whims. Enjoy!

Related Posts:
How to Modify a Recipe Part 1: Basics
How to Modify a Recipe Part 2: The Six Rules
How to Modify a Recipe Part 3: Granola Before and After

Goulash Soup, the original version

This is the original version of the Goulash Soup recipe from the Wall Street Journal, 1/20/07. If you are interested in seeing yet another example of recipe modification, you can compare this version to my modified version.

Readers familiar with my modification style will see several expected changes... :)

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Goulash Soup

Yield: 4 servings
Active preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 1 hour, 10 minutes

2 tablespoons grapeseed or sunflower oil
1 large onion, finely diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
3 tablespoons Hungarian sweet paprika
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 tablespoon ground caraway seeds
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
½ teaspoon dried thyme
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon red-wine vinegar
1 pound lean beef chuck or stew meat, in ½-inch cubes
½ pound Yukon gold potatoes, peeled, in ½-inch dice
Coarse salt
Juice of ½ lemon
Freshly ground black pepper

• In a large heavy saucepan, heat the oil over medium heat. Add onions and cook, stirring slowly and frequently, until onions are fragrant and brown, about 7 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute more.
• Add the paprika and cook until very fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the tomato paste, caraway, marjoram, thyme, bay leaf, vinegar, beef and 4 cups water. Bring to a boil then reduce heat to low and simmer uncovered for 30 minutes.
• Add the potatoes and ½ teaspoon salt and cook until the potatoes are tender, about 30 minutes more. Before serving, add the lemon juice and season to taste with more salt and pepper. This soup stores well for up to 2 days and can be reheated and reseasoned as needed.

Corned Beef and Cabbage

My wife and I aren't exactly Irish, but we both have siblings that married Irish people. So technically I guess that makes us Irish-in-laws.

But who's keeping track anyway? Irish or no, there's one dish I look forward to every year more than any other--Laura's corned beef and cabbage in the crockpot.

For most of the year we eat a pretty high-veggie, low-fat diet, and of course you've heard me rail against excess salt over and over again. But at this time of year--and fortunately it's only once a year--we pretty much abandon all restraint regarding both salt AND fat. Ah, sweet gluttony....

Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone!

Corned Beef and Cabbage
(The recipe below is a modified version from the recipe book that came with our crockpot)

6 carrots, cut into 3 inch pieces
3-4 lb corned beef brisket (you can trim some of the fat off, but good God, don't cut it all off!)
1 cup water

Put into crockpot and cook on high for 4 1/2 hours.

Then add:
4 potatoes, can be left unpeeled
1/2 head of cabbage cut into large wedges

Cook on high for an additional 2 to 2 1/2 hours.

Note: If you're like me, and you want to include extra cabbage (meaning more than will fit into the crockpot itself), not to worry. You can cook it separately in a saucepan. Just wait until maybe 30 minutes before everything is done, take 1 to 1 1/2 cups of broth out of the crockpot, pour it over the remaining cabbage, and simmer in a covered saucepan for 20-30 minutes.

The Deep Fryer: A Crisis of Conscience

I was in Wal-Mart the other day picking up some stuff, and I went through some of their kitchen items looking at baking pans and other things. I was stunned at how cheap everything was--proving once again that cooking at home is laughably cheap.

But then I saw it, teasing me with its placement at the end of the aisle, with the smiley face and the tantalizingly rolled-back price of only $29.99: An electric deep fryer!!

Wow, think of the things I could make with this!

Fried chicken. French fries. And I could really do Paul Prudhomme's fried hush puppies and catfish up right too, rather than my current method risking life and limb by using an open, splattering, non-stick pan. Heck, maybe I can find out once and for all whether deep-fried Oreos are as revolting as they sound!

But then I had a crisis of conscience. How often, really, will I deep fry? I was troubled--and deeply confused--by all the paradoxes that would be involved in making the purchase of this deep fryer "worth it."

Will this be the type of item that I use a lot after buying it to justify why I bought it? And if so, will I, by making the purchase justified, end up needing multiple angioplasties twenty years from now? What exactly does "worth it" mean in this case? By making an economically sound decision, will I merely buy an early and untimely end to my cooking voyages of discovery?

Is this like buying your own do-it-yourself crystal meth kit in order to save money? ;)

So, I dealt with all of these paradoxes and ethical dilemmas the way I always do: I cheated and took the easy way out. I decided to buy it because I thought it would be fun.

I'll keep you posted on what I make and I'll post any new recipes worth passing along.

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How to Make Fried Rice

Cooking, Simplified by Wall Street

Goulash Soup!

Goulash Soup, the original version

Corned Beef and Cabbage

The Deep Fryer: A Crisis of Conscience

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