Chile rellenos, Spanish rice, white beans with Swiss chard

I never saw a guest clear their plate so thoroughly and so quickly. This is unusual. I notice that Joe does not eat that much. 

"I can see you didn't like that so I won't bother offering more."  

Joe laughed.  

"Well, you didn't lick your plate." 

The only thing on Joe's plate were smears and the stem of a poblano chile, and I am only halfway done with mine.

I must record, Joe kept remarking how fantastic this meal is. He told me about top restaurants in Phoenix, how he bought two sets of two tickets for well-known restaurants, how they all have great views but not one of them, not one, has food good as this. Joe is a bullshitter, yes, an unusually successful salesman by trade, yes, but it did sound perfect, and he did clear his plate surprisingly. And I feel the same way.  

The combination on the plate is tremendous each element so homely so humble, the result so tremendously satisfying. The usual beans would be black beans but here I am using my own white beans with Swiss chard that has a pork chop in it and smoke included with a touch of sweet/sour. The beans are a meal by themselves and in combination with anything tastes even better. I had a bowl of these beans with a large spoonful of sour cream and I was in heaven. 

The sour cream also moderates the lingering heat of the red chile sauce. 

It is a small chicken breast and that is sliced laterally for two undersized chicken scallopini. The scallopini are fried in butter with salt/pepper, keeping everything simple. 

The poblanos are roasted to deep flavor, left to sweat it off by themselves in a bowl covered with a plate and then peeled. And the chicken is cooked. Cheese is sliced. Once the elements are arranged it goes very quickly so the plates must be ready with the reheated rice and reheated beans with Swiss chard, right there at the pan where these rellanos are fried.

Rellanos are strange things to bread up and fry.

Because there is no being tidy about it. Three bowls. 1) Seasoned flour 2) scrambled eggs 3) panko bread crumbs

That is all usual, the unusual part is handling these conical shaped peppers sliced open without bothering with toothpicks that only make things worse 

A small chicken scallopini is wrapped with the floppy roasted green chile and with a slice of cheese inserted as a booklet. The loose green booklet is pressed into the flour and coated. This allows the egg to adhere.

The dusted green chile pepper booklet is lifted into the whipped egg and coated completely. Now it is really a mess. The egg allows bread crumbs to adhere. 

In this manner, a coating is built up with a crunchy breadcrumb outer layer. You still have bowls with some egg remaining and still some more bread crumbs remaining.

A pan is heated with butter that has bubbled, fizzed out and turned nutty brown.

"Oh, you just move the whole thing over."

Joe is watching on the other side of the dividing wall. He was surprised to see the wood-block cart moved next to the stove so that the mess of bowls with flour, scrambled egg, breadcrumb and messily coated chile-chicken-cheese booklets are right next to the hot pan.

The plates with rice and beans are on the counter on the other side of the pan, so, everything is close together.

The intention is use all the egg and all the bread crumbs. The rest of it is added in the pan while it is cooking, so, very fast. A bit of back and forth between the bowls of both whipped egg and bread crumbs, added to the pan in pools, then the coated chile relleno, then pour more egg over it, allow it to pool and roll it around as it is frying until the chile is coated and toasted all around. 

It's fun to fry but a little different from other things. It's not exactly a stuffed chile within a crunchy conical pancake, but close. It is a way to think about how to cook the thing. 

And it is wonderful if not a bit of a fried mess. The depth of the roasted chile flavor cannot be overstated and this combination delivers two doses of it in both green and red forms. The red sauce has a very deep flavor on its own, one taste from your fingertip says so. The two together, deep red sauce, deep roasted poblano, with cheese melted in there are all awe-inspiring flavor combinations, so powerfully reminiscent of some lost ancient home and hearth that the chicken becomes nearly incidental, but of course it is not, it is the thing at the center of the glorified wrapping. 

Beans with pork, rice with blueberries, gyros, eggs in butter, breakfast

Shhhh, es tarde. Todos estan duermo. 

Sliced steak and rice

Shaved steak, not sliced. Mostly frozen steak run through the Cuisinart with no pressure at all, just the weight of feed tube apparatus itself so that the blade passes more times. Otherwise the slices would be too thick.

The idea comes from Taste of Philly next door. Their steak is shaved too. 

I tried frying the shavings, and this time frying and pressure cooking to tenderize more. I do not know what they are doing over there, I assume shaving beef, marinating it and grilling, so far theirs is consistently better than mine. They use a lot of beef too. I can tell by amount of shaving that come off a chunk and what that amount of shaving cooks down to.

I'm in a shaved steak phase right now. I'll figure this out. 

I could ask them at Philly's what they do, and they will answer, but from having already spoken with them I cannot expect much clarification. Like, if I were to ask, "What kind of steak do you use?" and "How is it processed before it gets here?" and "How long and in what kind of marinade?" and "Do you slice beef here or does it arrive already measured or what?" They will not be able to provide clarification. I imagine as much is already prepared as possible so that kids with no experience can pull it off consistently throughout their outlets throughout various states. 

Lamb, rice, liver

I could not decide which mesmerizing photograph of this outstanding satisfying meal of remnant lamb roast and rice with Asiago cheese and chicken liver to use so I put up two photographs because it is worth it. 

The chicken liver came inside a whole chicken and I'm glad it was in there. Sometimes this is called dirty rice, but I do not care for that descriptor.

The potato is microwaved so already done when fried with the lamb chunks in the same pan with onion and garlic. Removed from the pan, vermouth to clear off the pan, so the start of a sauce with butter, a tad flour for a very light roux and then cream while whisking. Elapsed time, 45 seconds.  The sauce fills the entire bottom of the plate.

With all that going on, and not bad for a scrounge session, eh?, my favorite part is still a thin slice of crispy neutral iceberg lettuce placed as a disc between two spoonfuls of flavorful rice. 

xxx

Pork with rice, Napa relish

Chicken thigh, rice, beans

The chicken is sticky. It was roasted earlier and frozen, cooked with water under pressure directly from the freezer in its frozen state. Then roasted in a countertop convection oven to crisp the skin. Again. And boy is it good. Even without a sauce or bread this is a very satisfying meal. 

Rice with pork

Our housekeeper Sueko would be so proud. She showed me about fried rice when I was ten. We didn't speak each other's language so all that was worked out without speaking. Discounting sound effects. 

But the thing is, I'm recalling her showing me at one stove at one little house and recalling her showing me at another stove at a different house and I know when my dad found her and his story about that which precludes the accuracy of the first memory and now I don't know what to remember. Anyway my first trials were with hotdogs and always tasted of catsup. And those are not Asian ingredients. 

But you can, with one simple trick, impress your family members, loved ones, significant others, and certainly your dog, by fooling them into thinking you actually know what you're doing.  Pour water into a ramekin or small bowl and dump it out. Pack cooked rice into the bowl then upturn the bowl of rice onto a plate and remove the bowl for a tight professional, or perhaps anally retentive, presentation. 

Chicken liver, rice

These chicken livers come with some whole chickens but not all all of them. And worse, you cannot be certain even the packaging sometimes says "may be missing giblets" 

The rest is chicken bones and parts frozen from previous chickens, some cooked and some raw. 

Rice is prepared using broth made from these parts along with mirepoix vegetables and seasoned distinctly with whole seeds. 

So, a pot for the chicken broth and a pot for the rice and a pot for the hot oil to fry the chicken livers. I was completely over dragging out pots so this meal lacks a sauce, and boy, is it ever dry.  Eating it reminded me of the days before I realized every meal should have a sauce, even if that sauce is something so simple as  thickly slavered flavored butter, thin broth, catsup, or egg yolk, something wet. 

Beans, rice, tomato sauce, potato, corn tortillas

Leftovers. I've been having a lot of this here and there on spaghetti and with polenta. 

After feasting on these things originally they sit in there so forlornly and I pass on them because I'm in the mood for something else and because these are so ugly and I forget how delicious I made them originally and how tremendous they are together. 

A bag of masa harina marketed for tamales, the same thing as this, contained disconcerting black dots. It reminded me of tiny insects. I think maybe they were. I threw out the bag. 

Any ol' kind of cheese, not particularly great. 

Rice, leftover bits and shredded lettuce soup

These are two unrelated leftover things reheated separately and combined in the serving bowl. I guess the decision is visual, it would be easier to reheat them together and doing it this way messes another bowl unnecessarily and that transgresses the bachelor's code, a primary objective. And yet I do heat them separately and wastefully mess that other bowl so that I can then put the two thing together like this. The odd thing is, there is nobody else around here right now to appreciate that extra effort, small as it is, so who am I trying to impress anyway with my dolled up leftovers? Who am I trying to be extra nice to? Huh? 

Myself?

I guess I am, I am being nice to myself. 

I suppose I should say, thank you. 

Yes, that's it. Of course. Thank you. Now do the dishes.

Black beans, rice, tomato, miso sauce

This meal saved my life tonight. 

I've had this feeling of running on empty before. Desperately empty. When I was a kid it happened a lot. Worse then because I didn't control things. 

NO!  You cannot have any raw French fries, it'll ruin your dinner! Now piss off until you're called. 

That sort of thing. I forgot about this feeling until now, energy drain, things not working right. Electrolyte depletion. Shakes. Weakness. Lightness. 

It's really stupid to wait until 8:30 at night to finally have something to eat. The awful watermelon earlier doesn't count, that didn't get consumed.  

Rice pot with paper towel gasket. 

* 1 cup short grain rice

* 1.75 cups water

The water with rice is brought to a roiling boil. That gets the steam going confidently but it is much too hot for the rest of the steaming. The heat is cut to nearly 0. The minute that it takes between a confident roiling boil and barely steaming is critical because the rice is already absorbing water and if the rice absorbs water too fast then it sticks to the bottom of the pot. So in this minute of transition between high heat and low, between open pot and closed pot,  the cook scrapes the rice off the bottom of the pot while lifting the pot off and on the burner to maintain steaming but without the rice sticking until finally the minute is over and the cook clamps on the lid confident that the pot will continue to steam the rice gently.  I seem to have used the word 'confident' three times. If you're so impetuous as to open the lid any time during this 35 minutes then you're on your own, I cannot help you. 

25 minutes steaming gently on low heat. Cover still on. 10 additional minutes off heat to continue steaming even more gently. 

The beans are cooked in 2 X the measured amount of water under low pressure for 40 minutes. That resulted in a small amount of extra water at the bottom of the pot which turned black. By low pressure I mean the first of two red notches on a pressure valve, or half pressure, or 7.5 LBS pressure. 

* 1 cup black beans

* 2 cups water

* 1/4 teaspoon salt

So, then I go to pour a glass of mango juice and there is a bug on the juice box. This one. 

It's a good bug innit -- a ladybird beetle. 

Miso sauce: 

*  1/2 cup water

*  2 level tablespoon miso

*  1/4 teaspoon dry hot chile pepper flakes

*  1 tablespoon Sriracha 

*  1 tablespoon mirin

*  2 tablespoons miso

*  black pepper but no salt

*  1/8 teaspoon garlic powder

*  1/4 teaspoon toasted sesame seed oil. 

The miso sauce is sweet. I do not know why I didn't come to this earlier. It is basically some of my favorite things in sauce form. I had enjoyed plain miso before as condiment to beans and rice and all kinds of vegetables independently, but it is even better as a sauce with a few favorite Asian additions. 

Seafood on rice

Seafood H8RZ, my intention is to convert you. 

Cold seafood on warm rice. The sauce is hoisin diluted with water. 

The seafood items are things I had on hand in the freezer. The pieces were thawed and then cut into bite-size segments. A small amount of water is brought to a near-boil, say, two cups to 200℉ /93℃ then removed from the heat source. The cut pieces are placed in the water that is not boiling. The temperature drops, but that is okay. The fish pieces cook almost immediately, the shrimp takes a minute or two longer. The heat must penetrate the shrimp's shell and then work its way into the center. So the fish pieces were removed before the shrimp. 1/4 cup kosher salt is whisked vigorously with a few cups of water in a deep bowl. The cooked fish pieces are transferred to the salt water. A tray of ice cubes tops the fish pieces and chills the water. The shrimp is finally added. 

Now the seafood is sitting there in the ice brine and you can go off and do something else. Within 10 minutes or so you will find the shrimp peels quite easily because it had been brined after it was cooked. Drain it all. The seafood will carry a very pleasant sea-like salted overtone. No further seasoning is necessary, certainly not soy sauce, which is salty. If the salt flavor is too heavy then the whole batch can be rinsed in fresh water to reduce the salt content using the same bowl. 

The rice is plain white short-grain rice. 

Let me describe what Sueko, our housekeeper, showed me when I was 10 years old living with my family in Tokyo. Sueko used Japanese rice that is unavailable in the United States. The rice had to be rinsed ritualistically 7 times. That is, fill the pot with the rice in it to the brim, drain it out entirely 7 times. The water never does clear completely, there is always a little cloudiness from surface starch, but most of it is gone. That is the part I did not like. I just did not have the patience to fill a pot 7 times, but I always obeyed because Sueko insisted that was part of the deal. Now, using California or Texas grown rice, it can be rinsed quickly under water held in a strainer. There is a lot less surface starch. 

Sueko used the index finger knuckle-joint-method method (1 inch/2.5cm ) to measure the amount of water above the amount of rice in the pot. You can see how the index finger knuckle-joint-method used with a broad low pot will produce different results than with a narrow tall pot. Or if you were a 6'7" man doing the finger knuckle-joint measuring compared to a 5'3 woman. There has to be a better way. Rice will absorb 1.5 X  to 2X it's measured volume of water. This rice was 1 cup rice to 1.75 cups water. 

Bring the water to a boil. Dump in the rice. Stir until it returns to a boil. Now the steaming action is initiated. Start the timer to 25 minutes. Cut the heat to low. Continue to stir to assure the residual heat will not burn or stick the rice to the bottom of the pot. The rice is rapidly absorbing the liquid and that will cause it to stick to the bottom. Keep stirring until that hazard is passed, then clamp on the lid and do not remove it even when the timer goes "ding".  Twenty-five minutes later the timer goes "ding". Reset the timer to 10 minutes. Cut the heat off completely and allow the rice to sit there inside the steamy pot for an additional 10 minutes without ever opening the lid. The timer goes "ding" a second time. Remove the lid and fluff the rice. 

Assess the rice and pot bottom situation. Did it stick to the bottom? Then the heat was too intense. Was all the water absorbed? If not, then obviously too much water. Keep these setbacks in mind for the next batch and adjust accordingly. This method works only for short-grain white rice, like sushi rice. All other rice types take a different approach. When steamed correctly, the rice will be a little bit sticky. This makes it possible to lift with chopsticks and to press into oblong balls for nigiri sushi and to spread for futomaki sushi rolls. 

Raw tuna on rice

Tekka-don. Although this is actually sushi-grade tuna so it might be called maguro-don, but let's not quibble about what to call it, any of those will do. 

I intended to include cucumber and toasted sesame seed, but then I forgot, and you know what? There was nobody around to say, "HEY, THIS WOULD BE PRETTY GOOD TEKKA-DON IF THERE WAS JUST SOME RAW CUCUMBER AND TOASTED SESAME SEEDS WITH IT!"

The rice is flavored with one tablespoon of ground up popcorn seeds which alters the taste toward grits (in the US) or polenta (everywhere else). It also tinges the rice yellow. But wait! There's more: The rice-steaming water is also flavored with bonito flakes. 

Bonito flakes are very strange and wonderful indeed. Also known as katsuobushi, it's skipjack tuna that has been dried and fermented and smoked and then shaved into flakes. The flakes turn plain water into, POW! Fish-flavored broth. Usually in combination with kombu kelp. The two together are wonderful. You get your essence of the ocean right there almost instantly. It's mystifying and magical and alluring. 

But here, we are just using bonito flakes with Japanese sake, and sugar with white pepper and sea-salt. And ground corn. So each day it's an adventure into a new combination of familiar things. Never are two meals ever exactly alike. I don't think I am capable of it. So that's the rice. 

The tuna is cut thinly and alternated with strips of nori, a dark seaweed processed into sheets like paper. 

The sauce is tamari, a type of thick fermented soy sauce, wasabi, Japanese sake, sugar, dried red chile flakes, and water. 

This tekka-don was lunch. It is so good, perfection really,  I feel like making it again for dinner. And maybe next time I'll use regular white rice with cucumber and toasted sesame seeds. I can also mix it up a little bit with other types of seafood to an appealing form of sashimi, or a mixed bowl with rice. There are not any actual rules restricting my impulses ... that I know about. 

Vegetables with rice

Olive oil flavored with a single smashed garlic clove in an oversized pot, then removed. First, purple cabbage, because it is the most dense,  then courgette and yellow squash cut into irregular wedges and seared in the flavored oil to near perfection and then removed to a holding bowl. A single beef patty, pre-formed and frozen broken into the hot pan. Deglazed with a tablespoon sake, tablespoon shoyu, tablespoon mirin. Prepared white rice held over from the ebi sushi made a few days earlier heated through with the beef chunks. Vegetables returned to pot to heat through. Egg turned throughout the mixture off the heat. And let me tell you what; rarely, if ever, will you have a stir-fried rice fantastic as this, minus the bean sprouts, bamboo shoots, and mushrooms, which goes to show you, or maybe just show me, that making do with what one has on hand often leads to outstanding result. 

Bison, beans, rice

I found two bison patties in the freezer that I didn't know were there. Surprise!

Bison. American bison. Exactly like the plains indians hunted and ate except probably a lot lazier. That's right, the plains indians made hamburger patties out of bison and drew khepers on them with mustard.  <--- I might have made up that last part.

Kepher.  Beetle bug. Dung beetle, specifically. A very common symbol. It means "become" and "manifestation" and "image" and an idea cloud of derivative and associated words. The lifecycle of the bug curiously closely resembles the burial practices of the ancient Egyptians, and  apart from its linguistic symbolism, in art its symbolism refers to resurrection and eternal life of persons, and mythologically it refers to the resurrection of the sun each morning. Kheper pushes the sun across the sky just as the real bug in nature pushes poo,  so apparently on top of everything else it is  quite large, supernatural,  and completely fireproof. <--- Okay I probably made that up too.  Anyway, one sees the bug all over the place, in jewelry in household objects,  and now I'm pretending it is pushing my bison burger across my plate.

STOP PLAYING WITH YOUR FOOD!


¿What?

Black beans, brown rice, yellow cornmeal. The beans were dry and cooked directly in a pressure pot. Since the pot is heavy and it was already out, and since brown rice takes longer than white rice, the rice  too was cooked in the same pressure pot but separately from the beans because black beans turn everything black. Or purple. Or gray. Or some icky dull color. And I don't like that.  After all that, the corn meal is cooked in the same pot! But not with pressure. It's an additive for flavor and for glue so I could make a pile out of it. Delay tactics. I had all night, and I wasn't all that hungry.

Rice vinegar, my fave, and a nice bright olive oil, my other fave, over the lettuce and tomato with  sea salt, my other other fave.

The whole time I was going, "Why is this so hot? I didn't add any chile peppers to this. What is going on here? Is this magic, or what?" And then I remembered the handful of black peppers I threw into the beans. Duh. I really overdid it there. But you know what? The peppercorns softened and shriveled to nothing under pressure so I didn't even notice them and the whole thing together  tastes fantastic.

* dry black beans
* chicken broth
* fresh rosemary
* fresh bay leaf
* excess of black peppercorns
* brown sugar.

I'm thinking brown sugar might be an acid. The beans never did soften 100% and that's unusual when cooked with pressure unless acid is present, which is why vinegar or molasses should be held off until the very end of cooking. But that's okay with me because I don't much care for soft beans, I do prefer a little resistance although I realize that is not universal.

Eggs, rice, chile

I've seen people whisk egg whites to achieve fluffy omelets. I do not care for that technique because the result is fried puff. Air eggs. I do not want that. In that case, lightness is achieved by creating foam, but the eggs are still overcooked and often with an unpleasant incongruent toasted exterior, that, when it comes to egg, is an indication of overcooking. It is like a fried souffle. 

The aim is light egg contrasted with dense egg and different from air-bubble egg. I want barely cooked egg not rubberized egg-like material. I've learned to watch carefully, to stand there and continuously lift the cooked portion so that liquid egg runs under the cooked curd into the evacuated space and to keep doing that until it no longer runs. Flip if necessary, but usually residual heat will finish. The result is a pile of cooked egg layers that can then be rolled or folded to double or triple the stack. This pictured here was folded in thirds, it was so thick that folding amounted basically to rolling, for an impressively high stack of exceedingly lightly cooked egg. You never see that. Apparently I'm the only person on the Earth who does this. I should patent this idea. 

I will call these "lifted eggs." 

I think I'll host a brunch sometime and serve egg prepared this way one at a time (which is really three eggs at a time) and carefully reserve them in a warm oven until they're all done, assemble the plates, and blow everybody's mind right out of their skulls. 

BLAM! Brains all over the place. 

But not today, I'm slumming it today. 

This is rice that is cooked using the rice-steaming skillz of two separate divergent techniques. Japanese prefer their rice a little sticky, I think, because it makes it possible to pick up with chopsticks. To cook, excess surface starch is rinsed, then the rice is steamed, then is sits off heat but still covered to completion. Europeans, on the other hand, fry the rice in oil first to ensure grain separation and a fluffy non-sticking result. For risotto  the liquid begins with a cup of wine, which when fully absorbed and evaporated  is continued with another boiling liquid. The point is to keep the rice uncovered and continuously moving in moderate amount of liquid so the starch gets knocked off the individual grains to form a creamy sauce along with the cooking liquid  delivered in increments which becomes concentrated through the process by absorption and by evaporation. 

This rice pictured here starts out European but finishes Japanese.  The rice was not rinsed. The dry grains were fried in olive oil, a decidedly un-Asian ingredient, until brown along with fennel seed and combination of dried chile peppers. Once browned, it was  doused with a cup of red wine which is an odd choice, but it's what I had on hand. The wine used was old, oxidized, and vinegary.  Stirred until all the liquid absorbed and evaporated, then chicken broth added to steam covered as ordinary Japanese rice. The result is wonderfully uniquely flavorful  fluffy dry rice in dire need of a sauce.

This is the surplus chile reserved frozen that already has brown rice and beans in it with lots of pork. So on this plate is a double whammy of rice; white rice as a base, colored  and heavily flavored, and brown rice in the chile which is performing as sauce.  White rice and brown rice, daring in'nit. 

Topped with amedium Australian cheddar that was on sale at W.F.. I wish I had bought more of that stuff, but it was an experiment.

I have no cilantro or parsley but I do have mint and basil so that's what is used here. 

This odd combination of ingredients, flavors, and technique, is incredible. It's days like this that I amaze myself. I would not serve this exactly as it is to guests, and if I were a chef it would not be on the menu.  I'm afraid it's unmarketable, but the way this egg is prepared, not as an omelet, not as regular scrambled eggs, unlike a souffle, and not itself enhanced with any internal extraneous material or flavors, is nonetheless quite the spectacle there on the plate in its soft lofty extravagant pile once it's cut into and its dimension exposed. 

Rice, gyros meatloaf, poached egg

This is my latest obsession; poached egg on everything. Poached egg on my bread, poached egg on handmade pasta, poached egg on popcorn kernel polenta, poached egg on meatloaf, poached egg on rice. Poached egg here, poached there, poached egg everywhere. Today's poached egg was particularly well-behaved.

Simmering water covering a few inches of a low fry pan. A few tablespoons vinegar into the water. An egg cracked into a ramekin. The egg gently dumped at once into the center of the pan. It held together so beautifully today, and that's not always the case.

This lamb/pork/beef mixture is too much like meatloaf. The last batch was too dry and insufficiently adhesive. It's a texture thing. The flavor right but the texture is wrong. My next attempt will be different. I intend to process the meats with a slicer and use meatloaf adhesion techniques, except with thinly sliced meat. If that appears to not work, then I'll process further using the bottom chopping blade, but careful not to over process. Then compress. No stacked slices, no grinding. Then see what happens.

Gravy whipped out in a separate pan, at this point rather boring.

* butter brought to nutty brown.

* equal part A/P flour cooked in the butter until browned

* S/P + garlic powder + prepared Vindaloo curry + cayenne pepper all in scant amount

* chicken broth whisked in and added in continuous stream until desired viscosity attained with corrections as it boils. I should have added wine, or at least saki or something, beer, anything, I mean, it's always right there.

Green chili and rice

Fried rice

Rice pressure cooked for five minutes in 1.5 X water to rice. Left to depressurize of heat.

* held-over kielbasa added.

American fried rice

Oh, my God. Hold me. This stuff is good. All my favorite things brought together onto one plate.

Hot with habanero pepper flakes (grown on window sill), salty with fish sauce which is made from anchovy, sweet by the addition of small amount of brown sugar, tart with unique flavor of pineapple. Sour with unfresh white wine gone off. Flavor blasted with cumin because I just bought a new jar and felt like using some. Aromatic with basil because the cilantro I have is ready to toss out. All this at once! Like a party gotten all rowdy and out of control right there in your mouth.

White rice cooked the usual way; 25 minute on low simmer, 10 minutes off heat, covered throughout. This time it's not particularly sticky because I didn't intend to eat it with chopsticks, and looseness achieved by frying the grain in a Tablespoon of oil for a few minutes before starting off

Mushrooms in quantity. Onion, garlic, chubby hybrid snow peas, small harmless colored peppers, fresh pineapple, and of course, roasted chicken previously frozen the natural result of producing home-made chicken broth.

Shape with a moistened container like a tea cup or a bowl.

What? Want to know how to pull this off with the breeziness of a master chef? Fine.

Start the rice. You now have 25 minutes to prepare whatever ingredients you chose to include, which is more time than you need. Make sure you have a comic book or internet connection to keep you entertained for the additional minutes. Bored cooks tend toward meanness. Chop everything. Collect your flavorings. Decide if you want to include an egg or not. Go through all the flavors that can hit your tongue and imagine how you intend to cover them, taking care not to accidentally double down. For instance, salt could be soy sauce, fish sauce, or, er, salt. Sweetness could be mirin sauce, cane sugar, turbinado sugar, Splenda™, brown sugar, white sugar, honey. See what's going on here? You'll never make this dish the same way twice. Get the vegetables together. They can be fresh or frozen. Use whatever you have. Choose a protein, it can be anything, even tofu or beans. For my very first stir fry when I was ten years old I used a chopped up hot dog. Our Asian housekeeper, who was the person who taught me, thought that was hilarious. My flavoring was catsup which turned the whole mass pink and oddly overly sweet, she thought that was hilarious too. Turns out, she adopted my choices. Well, at our house anyway.

When you have four minutes remaining for the rice to finish steaming off the heat, begin heating the vegetables as a stir fry. The longest cooking vegetables first. Blast everything on high then abruptly kill the heat once they're all done which should be just a few minutes. This time, I used a large heavy pot rather than a large pan or a wok because I'm tired of things spilling out over the edges or flying all over the kitchen, and because I just don't care. And it's not like I was on television or anything. The last thing added is the rice freshly opened from the steaming pot or an egg worked into the mass. That is all. It's fun!