Story of My Dinner: Episode 3

Tonight my class was canceled, so I celebrated by watching Netflix movies and eating fried rice.  I know, I should have been doing homework, but there's only a week left of classes, and I'm getting antsy for Christmas Break.  Besides, I LOVE fried rice, especially drowned in yummy soy sauce.  It's a must-have every time I go out for Chinese.  I love it so much that I invented a recipe for it when I was a young teenager and have since perfected  it (in my opinion).  I have it almost once a week.

Fried Rice
2 cups water
1 cup uncooked rice
1 large chicken breast, cut into bite-sized pieces
1 tbsp olive or sesame oil
soy sauce
ginger
pepper
garlic powder
2 carrots, diced and cooked
1/3 cup peas
2 eggs

1. Boil water, and add rice.  Cover, and turn down to low heat.  Cook rice for 20-25 minutes.
2. While the rice is cooking, pour oil into a frying pan, and then add chicken.  Stir the chicken in the oil to coat and add soy sauce (I like a lot of soy sauce, so I do about 2 tbsp here), as well as a dash of ginger, garlic powder, and pepper.  Turn onto medium-high heat and fry until chicken is cooked on the sides but not in the middle.  Fill pan with a quarter of an inch of water and continue to cook the chicken until the water almost completely boils off (5-10 minutes).  Check to make sure that the chicken is completely cooked.
3. Push the chicken to the side of the pan and crack eggs into the pan, scrambling with your spatula.  Add a little soy sauce to the eggs to flavor them.  When the eggs are cooked, add carrots, peas, rice (once it's cooked), and about a tablespoon of soy sauce.  Stir well.  Taste, and add more ginger, garlic, pepper, or soy sauce as desired.

Sorry, my recipes are always kind of rough.  I never measure the ones I make up.  Also note that these aren't the only things I'll add to my fried rice -- this is just what I made tonight.  If I have spinach or green onions, I'll add those vegetables, or even broccoli.  It just depends on what I have on hand.

So for my story tonight, I thought long and hard about it.  I realize that my fried rice doesn't look that different from my Turkey and Rice I had on Monday.  I kept staring at it, trying to come up with something new, and all I could picture was this blob of rice coming alive and walking off the plate, like something off Better Off Dead (hilarious movie, btw).  Then I remembered another story about food coming alive, written/illustrated by a favorite writer of mine, Bill Waterson.

So yes, today I'm copping out and letting someone else tell my story.  But you can't really complain.  What's better than Calvin and Hobbes?  And it actually fits with this blog anyway, because it's literature (yes, I'm calling graphic novels literature), AND it's a fantastic allusion to my all-time favorite Shakespeare play, Hamlet.  Enjoy!

I love how the blob stabs itself with a fork.  :)

Come back tomorrow for another episode of Story of My Dinner!  Tomorrow I'll write my own story.  Maybe I'll even draw a comic strip.  What do you think?