Quick School-Day Meal

CEBU, Philippines — At many homes, the mind-breaking morning rush is a five-days-a-week scenario once again now that the school classes are back. It’s harder for homemakers who themselves have to go to work. It eats up more time now to have to get everything ready for the kids to go to school on time.

Getting the small ones to the shower is not as hard as preparing early breakfast, though. The real challenge is putting food on the breakfast table and in the lunch boxes – quickly. Food preparation is only half of the challenge; the other half is choices.

No, having food ready early in the morning is not enough. The food prepared shall match the collective taste of the family. It has to be food that they like, for breakfast and lunch.

The “instant” stuff helps a lot – particularly instant noodles, which can be tweaked in various ways by adding extra ingredients. But instant noodles cannot stand on its own for long, even with the variations that can be made of it. Homemakers need to stretch their creative minds to think up other food stuff that also have potentials to be tweaked into other things. Meals being a day to day – or even a thrice a day – matter, it is important to give it a different face every so often, for both taste and eye appeal.

One such meal item that has various possibilities is rice. Plain cooked rice is okay. Then, after a while, when leftover rice begins to build up due to taste burnout in the family, it can be made into fried rice. Fried rice itself has various possibilities of its own.

It’s okay to make fried rice out of either freshly cooked rice or leftover rice. In general, fried rice is a popular favorite. The grownups love to pair it with coffee; the school kids, with hot chocolate.

Fried rice exactly fits the time challenge of the morning rush at home. There may be no need to cook several dishes one at a time. Hotdogs or bacon or chorizo or dried fish and eggs can just go with the rice and end up in one hot plate – to everybody’s delight.

The rice may be cooked the night before, after dinner, to save on precious time in the morning. The accumulated leftover rice from the day shall be considered in determining how much rice to cook for next day’s breakfast. One meat or fish ingredient to mix with the rice may be enough – either chorizo or dried fish, or whatever; even leftover pieces of a dish will do. Eggs are a standard ingredient.

Fried rice is a deceptively simple dish to make – deceptive because it really takes creativity on the part of the cook to make it come out superb to whet everyone’s appetite. And there are ingredients to be careful about – for example, when adding soy sauce the goal is not to add so much as to discolor the fried rice. A toasty, tawny look after the soy sauce is stirred through is okay, but not a dark brown. Fish sauce can be tricky, as well; its light color may tempt one to put in more, resulting in a rather too salty outcome.

As with the eggs – rather than frying the rice in oil first, it’s better instead to pour the beaten egg base onto the medium-hot oil. The rice is then carefully folded into the eggs, taking care to not flatten the rice and eggs. The result is small puffy pillows of egg in the finished fried rice. There will be no stringy, shaggy bits of eggs, but small lumps that actually taste like eggs.

Onions are to be cut sharply into bits. Not only will it add a bit of beauty to the finished fried rice – onion bits poke through the rice like tiny jade spears. It is added at the very end to preserve its fragrance.

Leftover or ‘old’ rice is preferable. Freshly cooked rice has the tendency to be sticky, which can be a hassle in mixing all the ingredients. This is another reason why cooking the rice the night before is advisable. 

Again, it takes creativity to make fried rice that everyone will like. The starting cook may start with what appeals to his or her own taste. Creativity, like skill, can be acquired. It may take a few mistakes, but if one is careful enough those mistakes will still be edible.

Here’s a slight tweak of a great fried rice recipe by A. E. Dwyer at www.takeout.com:

Easy Fried Rice

Ingredients:

2 slices of bacon, diced (hotdog or whatever leftover dish will do too)

2 onions, sliced thinly on a sharp bias

4 cups leftover or ‘old’ rice

3 eggs, well-beaten

2 tsp soy sauce

Salt

Procedure:

• Heat a wok over medium-high heat. Add diced bacon and sauté until crisp and golden. Remove from pan and leave about a tablespoon of residual bacon fat in the pan.

• Add beaten eggs, swirling to evenly coat the bottom of the pan. When the edges start to ruffle, add the rice evenly on to the eggs. Gently but expeditiously stir them around, breaking the eggs into small pieces. Do not press down on the rice, so as to keep its fluffy texture. You may use chopsticks to do the stirring, to avoid the impulse to smoosh down with a spatula. 

• When the rice is warmed through, add bacon back in and stir through. Add a small pinch of salt to season.

• Season with a teaspoon of soy sauce to start, and take a quick taste. If you like a bit of a deeper flavor, add another teaspoon. Go for a light brown color, not a murky dark shade.

• Turn off the heat, add onions and stir through. Add a drizzle of toasted sesame oil, and stir gently to incorporate. Scoop into bowls and serve immediately.