Throwback: Filipino Fried Rice (with Guest Post by C)

Note: This is one of my favorite posts from my old blog, and I felt it needed a place here in the new one. I posted it in February 2015, so the timing seemed appropriate. 

Last week in Nashville it snowed. Readers from the northeast must be thinking, “Yeah, so?” But the fact that the city of Nashville has no equipment whatsoever to combat icy roads means that the presence of snow shuts the city down. It didn’t help that after it snowed an ice storm came through, covering the city in stunningly beautiful, dangerous ice. It's poetic really, and sort of speaks to the balance in life that beauty is usually accompanied by danger.

C and I had just come home from our Valentine’s Day trip to Chicago a mere 2 hours before the storm hit. We made it home at 1:30 am and awoke to a powdered sugar world. We were stuck. To make matters worse, all the stores in the city had shut down, but honestly, there was no point in venturing out when you had fleece pajamas and a Netflix account.

The only thing was, we had no food in the house. I mean, almost none. We knew we were going to be away for the weekend, so we hadn’t bothered to buy groceries. And that stuff about snow coming? To Nashville? Pfft! We didn’t believe it! Boy, did we regret that skepticism, because by about 5 pm after eating nothing all day, we were really, really hungry.

I peered into our sad looking, nearly empty fridge. All we had were 2 eggs and green onions. That was it. I opened the freezer and noted a package of frozen shrimp and a package of frozen longanisa, which is a chubby little Filipino sausage that’s chock full of spices. C was morosely staring at our cupboard, “All we have is a bag of rice” he said in a brittle voice. It was at that moment I realized I could make some dinner out of this motley crew of ingredients. 

I relaxed, poured myself and C a glass of red wine, shooed him to the couch with his copy of “Criminal Law: Cases and Materials” and set to work. 


Ingredients:

Frozen Longanisa (This can be bought at any Filipino store, but most Asian markets carry them as well. Mine were already cured, which made the cooking process really quick)

Frozen Cooked Shrimp (Tails off and de-veined.)

Green onion
2 Eggs
Rice (Any kind will do, but I’d be a bad Asian if I didn’t tell you to try to use rice of good quality.)
Chili Olive Oil
Sesame Seed Oil
Soy sauce
Garlic Power (Mine has parsley in it too.)
Chili powder
Pepper
 

Performance:
While I assembled my ingredients I asked C to start cooking some rice. He’s actually become quite the expert on rice cookers these days, and I thought it would be fun to have him guest author the bit about rice. C writes:


Calynn called me back from the couch to cook her some rice. A few years ago, when I was in Japan, I learned about the wonders of computerized rice cookers. Rejected by most westerners as a silly affectation, high-end Japanese-built rice cookers are held in the highest regard by Asians from Changchun to Singapore. If you’ve never had rice cooked in a good rice cooker, you can’t fully understand what you’re missing. These things make essentially perfect rice—of any type—with just a few clicks through some menus on a screen. Last summer, I bought myself a rice cooker to end all arguments, a Zojirushi NP-HBC10. At the time, this purchase caused me all sorts of grief from more practical people; however, all the rice cooker’s detractors have at last been won over. My computerized contraption has an LCD screen on its front, a superb non-stick pot in the middle, and a speaker that plays “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on its back. Lest you forget its illustrious provenance, MADE IN JAPAN is emblazoned on the front, in letters as large as the brand name.

I rinsed off two cups of short-grain white sushi rice and poured them into the rice cooker. The cooker has little hash marks to show you how much water to use. After filling the pot appropriately, I closed the lid, set the program to the type of rice I was using, and pressed the COOK button. After the machine serenaded me with my favorite lullaby, I reluctantly returned to the couch and engrossed myself in second-degree murder cases.


…And I’m back! I hope you enjoyed C’s addition. Let’s return to our regularly scheduled recipe:

While C made the rice I de-frosted the longanisa and shrimp in warm water and cut the green onions into little emerald rings. Once the longanisa was no longer frozen, I cut them into medallions and tossed them into a wok glazed with chili olive oil. I cooked the longanisa until they were crispy on the outside, then added the shrimp. The longanisa imparted lots of different spices that the shrimp absorbed, and since the shrimp were already cooked, it took only a few seconds in the wok to get them pink and adorably curled. I tossed in the green onions and took a moment to appreciate how pretty all the ingredients looked, all tumbled together in the wok. I then added C’s rice and shimmied in soy sauce, sesame oil, chili powder, garlic powder, and pepper. I combined everything, then asked C to crack two eggs into the middle of the mixture, and stirred vigorously to scramble the eggs into the waiting rice, shrimp, onions, and longanisa.

C dubbed the meal “Filipino Fried Rice,” and I realized that’s exactly what it should be called. We ate our dinner with white and blue ceramic chopsticks we bought at an antique mall in Charlottesville, Virginia before we moved. The hot food made us take quick inhales with each bite to cool our tongues. We talked about how we were snowed in last year, when I made pancit in our little barn house in the Virginia countryside. How quiet it was there with nothing but the trees and each other for company. And how now, even in this loud city, the snow hushed everyone up.