I haven’t posted a recipe in a while, but here’s dinner tonight. I call this “Cheater’s Fried Rice” because it takes so many shortcuts that it only vaguely resembles the original, but it’s another in my collection of kid-friendly meals. This is also a rare instance of a no-recipe meal in my rotation. But here goes:
1. Prepare 3 rice-cooker-cups of rice. If you don’t have a rice cooker, then I suppose step one is actually “buy a rice cooker, preferably one with a timer” because they’re extremely useful even if you don’t cook much Chinese food. You can also cook barley, for beef barley stew, in it. I don’t know if they’re all this way, but mine is non-stick, which is great, because I always used to hate dealing with rice being over- or under-cooked and sticking to the pot. For regular fried rice, you’re supposed to use cold rice, but I don’t, because I don’t plan that far ahead.
2. Cook a 16 oz bag of mixed vegetables. Microwave is fine. Drain.
3. Cut up a package of smoked sausage — we use turkey sausage to dial down the calories. To get small pieces, I cut each piece in half lengthwise, then each half in thirds lengthwise again, then cut into bite-sized pieces, but you can figure this out.
4. Put some oil in the pan, and fry up the smoked sausage. Then add the veggies and the rice and mix together, adding more oil as needed.
5. Last step — the two nontraditional ingredients. This was my husband’s innovation because he doesn’t like traditional soy-sauce fried rice. Add a dollup of teryaki sauce (maybe a couple tablespoons) and a smaller dollup of molasses to sweeten it.
So this is clearly a kid- rather than adult-friendly dish, but even my picky eater (coincidentally named Mikey) loves it. And if you get the rice-cooker started, you can cook this up pretty quickly.
(Apologies for the lousy picture — from the iPad, and an older one, at that.)
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