How things suddenly come together completely inexplicably: Some Thoughts on Making Fried Rice at Home

For years Miss Edith has been a fan of fried rice of the sort you get at Chinese restaurants. Obviously some fried rice is better than others, but basically it's pretty much all good and I can't recall any fried rice that I refused to eat on the grounds of it being too disgusting.

However, I've never been able to make fried rice at home. I know, I know, you have to start with cold, cooked rice; done that. It didn't matter. I'd never made a pan of fried rice worth eating. After several years of trying a few times a year, I eventually gave up, figuring, "Ok, this Just Is Not Worth It."

I then read somewhere that it's nearly impossible for Americans to cook decent Chinese food on their home stoves because the burners don't get nearly as hot as the burners in professional kitchens. This, I can easily believe, and I thought, "Well, fine then; from now on, I will satisfy my jones for fried rice by just buying it from the Chinese takeout places in town, and stop feeling guilty about not making it at home."

Last week, though, I found myself incredibly hungry for lunch and staring into a refrigerator that held many fine comestibles but nothing that was immediately and obviously Lunch. My eye fell on a rather large quantity of cold leftover rice and I thought, "You know, I'll do fried rice. I'm so hungry, even if it sucks, I'll eat it."

So I got out a nice big frying pan (we do not own a wok; never saw the point in acquiring one), heated up some peanut oil, and chopped up the on-their-way-to-sadness scallions that were in the bottom of the vegetable bin. I also had a little onion and some garlic, so I tossed those into the peanut oil. When all the members of the allium family (did I get that right?) were smelling heavenly, I began to crumble the rice into the pan. I stirred efficiently and expertly, as if I'd done this a million times. I turned to beat an egg in a little bowl, and uncapped a bottle of soy sauce and opened my bottle of rooster sauce. Dousing the rice with soy and rooster sauce, I noticed that somehow, for the first time, the stuff in the pan looked like... fried rice. And it smelled incredibly good, like.... proper fried rice. I thought, "Huh." And kept stirring.

I pushed most of the rice toward the edges of the pan, and poured the beaten egg into the middle of the pan. I carefully drew the rice through the egg, and stirred gently for a few more minutes, and by the time the dish was done cooking I was practically floored by how decent the dish looked. Ladling some of the fried rice into a bowl, I thought, "I think I've finally made it." Somehow, after more than ten years of attempting fried rice, something had come together in my head, or in my technique, or something, and I'll never know what, but let me tell you:

It wasn't fancy; there were no shrimps; there wasn't even any chicken. But that was one really, really good bowl of fried rice.
Victory.

Let's see if I'm ever able to pull it off again...