Left Over Chinese Food Fried Rice

I love going out to get Chinese family-style food because I always know I'm coming home with left overs. Well in my book, "left overs" is synonymous with "Surprise! Ingredients!". Yesterday in the thralls of being devastatingly ill, yes I was so very very sick, or at least I whined like I was...

Anyway! My sweet husband was kind enough to bring me pan-fried chicken from my favorite Chinese restaurant, and tonight I returned the favor by transforming the remains into fried rice.

I chopped up the remaining chicken into small cubes but removed the vegetables because by this time they are soggy and not so great. The rice was refrigerated, which actually makes it better for frying.

Here are my personal absolute essentials for making fried rice:

Rice (DUH)
green onion
Soy sauce
Vegetable oil
Sesame Seed oil
salt

(If adding eggs you'll need 2 eggs)

If you've got these in your kitchen, you're golden. Nonessentials include eggs, soybeans, carrot, and any spices or ingredients you might want to throw in.

Start by heating your vegetable oil on medium high in a wok or large frying pan. Add your salt and green onions NOTE: if you have any frozen veggies or frozen cooked shrimp etc. you should add them in now as well. I added frozen edamame (soybeans). Stir for about 1 minute. If you're adding eggs, you'll add 1 here, and scramble it. This gives you the tiny threads of egg you see in the restaurants. Then add your rice, soy sauce, and your second egg. The second egg helps bind the rice together. Toss for... I don't know, until you've cooked the eggs. Then splash with sesame seed oil and give it one final stir before serving immediately.

Super delicious! Super awesome! Super... not wastey...? It's SUPER.

Banana Cream Scones

Today I was making scones with my usual recipe and I spied an ancient box of Banana Cream Pudding mix in my cabinet. It seemed to say, "Go on, do it... I DARE YOU." Well no pudding mix challenges ME and gets away with it! HaHA!

Preheat oven to 425
2 C. Flour
4 Tsp. Baking Soda
3/4 Tsp. Salt
1/3 Sugar <---- I substituted half of this for pudding mix but in retrospect I should have added more.
5 Tbsp. Butter, cold, and cubed.
3/4 C. Cream

Mix the first 5 ingredients together until it is fine and crumbly. Add cream and mix just until it sticks together. Divide into 10-12 small scones or 6-8 large, however you like.
Bake until goldeney brown, small scones will cook much faster, about 8-10 minutes.

"I meant to do that" Peach Pancake Scramble

I didn't mess up, you guys just can't understand my genius. You see, it may appear that I attempted to make a buttermilk pancake in a pan far too small to accommodate it but I totally knew what I was doing!

You see, I chopped up some peaches for my lunch which turned out to be fairly under ripe so I cooked them in my smallest pan adding olive oil and cinnamon. Then I remembered that I had left over pancake batter I had made the morning before. So I poured this over my peaches, arranged quite nicely in the pan thinking this was a stupendous idea. Then I tried to turn it and history was made... quite messily. I've used this method before whilst making omelets. I ended up with a scrambled peach pancake that actually fit quite nicely into my lunch box. Much more travel friendly than a pancake or a crepe. You see? Genius. Sometimes I amaze myself!

Oh and if you need a little extra sweetness, drizzle a little maple syrup on while cooking and swish that around.

Maguyver No-Bake cookies

My husband wanted cookies last night but there was one problem. It's incredibly hot here in the summer I wasn't about to turn on the oven. So I had heard of "no bake" or "ice box" cookies before, are they different? I'll have to investigate. Anyway, I found a particularly popular recipe at allrecipes.com and set to work. Here is that original recipe:

• 2 cups white sugar
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup margarine
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 pinch salt
• 1/2 cup chunky peanut butter
• 3 cups quick cooking oats

1. In a saucepan over medium heat, combine the sugar, cocoa, milk and margarine. Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Boil for 1 minute, then remove from heat and stir in the vanilla, salt, peanut butter and oats.
2. Drop by rounded spoonfuls onto waxed paper. Allow cookies to cool for at least 1 hour. Store in an airtight container.

SUBMITTED BY: bybet2

My train of thought went as such...

"Two cups sugar!? Thats way too much, I'll add one cup... hmm no cocoa powder. But I do have hot chocolate mix! I have butter... vanilla... peanut butter? Hmm, all I have is almond butter. I think I'll add some coconut too."

Despite my absolute inability to properly follow a recipe these cookies turned out fantastic. My husband really liked them and so did I. I've been out of baking cocoa for quite some time but I keep subtituting hot chocolate mix or Ovaltine and it's hasn't blown up in my face yet. The coconut was especially delicious.

Almond Milk

I've recently delved into recreating Medieval recipes. Almond milk was a widely used substitute for cow and sheep milk which spoiled quickly. Not to mention nearly impossible if you didn't have livestock; buying animal milk was possible, but it was expensive and was often watered down.

I started by blanching the almonds, this process involves boiling them in a pot of water for no more than 90 seconds. Then I removed them immediately from heat, strained them, and doused the almonds in cold water. This allowed the brown top skin to loosen and it could be peeled quite easily. I can imagine this being a mindless process one would have done while sitting with others and gossiping or telling stories. I watched a movie, personally, but it was almost 1am so my options were limited.

Unfortunately my Medieval recipe book seems to have failed me because the next step asked me to put the almonds in a blender and liquefy. Now I'm not an authority of Medieval history but I'm fairly certain this wasn't the original method. In any case, I chopped the almonds finely, let them sit in the blender overnight in 2 cups-ish of filtered water and blended them in the morning. I think I could have blended them for longer than I did, approximately 10 seconds, but I have (and always have had) a terrible aversion to very loud noises. Happy Fourth of July, by the way. Once this was done, I strained the frothy liquid through a sieve and was surprised at how much it looked like milk!

It has an odd taste, very almondy but not savory nor sweet. It's the perfect base, however, you can add honey and cinnamon or garlic and rosemary depending on the recipe. I rendered a successful 1 Cup and 1/4 Almond milk, unfortunately I don't know what to do with it.

I had to share...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7huyzRGgLOQ

Garlic Ginger Paste

If you're looking for good food and you're unfamiliar with the area, just look for a tiny hole-in-wall restaurant that's jam packed with locals. Such is the case with a personal favorite of mine, a Chinese take-out extravaganza called Bento Express. When I'm not satiating my craving f0r wonton soup, I'm trying to deconstruct the relatively simple ginger garlic paste that I have fallen in love with. Now for those of you saying, "Whats in a GARLIC and GINGER paste? Don't strain yourself, sweetheart." I'd like to say shut up, smart ass, I'm getting to that. The paste is a bright green color, so I'm considering wether that means they use the stocks of the garlic? It's unclear. I have acquired a sample to bring home and I believe that it's most likely put through a food processor since the peices are all a generally uniform size, which is extremely fine. It could be hand chopped if the maker was some sort of super cyborg chef robot from the future... which is a possiblity that has not been ruled out as of yet.

Homemade Granola Bars

I was recently at Safeway when I reached for a box of Granola bars...

*You see I belong to the group of people who like to sleep until the absolute last minute; afterward having planned out the exact amount of time it takes to get ready before I have to go to work. So a easy accessible breakfast is essential to my scheme. But the granola bar breakfast has always been a begrudging one for me. The basic brand name tend to have a acidic and almost chemically aftertaste where the natural organic types are tasty but very expensive. *

I stopped myself and thought, "what exactly am I buying?", oatmeal, granola, usually some sort of sweet fruit or chocolate, and something to bind them all together. Well screw that, I usually have most of that stuff at home. And Hell, at that point I had ALL that stuff at home.

Granola Bar base:

Oatmeal
Granola
melted butter (approximately 1/2 a stick)
melted honey - 2 Tbsp.
1 Egg - whisked (for adhesive)

mix together until all the dry ingredients are coated with the butter/honey mixture. At this point you can add any other ingredients you like. I had a few things on hands from making cookies recently so I added...

Chocolate chips
Coconut shavings
Brown sugar to taste

Pack the ingredients tightly into a round cake pan as if you were making a crust layer (oatmeal pie crust, I must remember this for later.) I baked this at 350 degrees until... uh.. until it smelled good. 10-15 minutes? I don't know. I have found that this recipe sticks heavily to even nonstick cake pans but I believe that parchment paper will fix this problem. Refrigerating them or even freeing them overnight allows the bars to be cut into squares and individually wrapped, however, they rarely make it to that stage.

A Brief Introduction

I wont dwell on irrelevant details of my life, because frankly you don't care and it's not interesting anyway. I'm hoping this blog can become a kind of open journal for me to share what recipes I'm attempting and at some times inventing in my kitchen, and I'd be very interested to read what others have concocted as well. It will most likely be pockmarked with ramblings about my views on diet and nutrition, and anything else I feel is crushing my soul at the moment, but I hope you'll bear with me.