Kashmiri Fried Rice and Salmon with Turmeric and Garlic - Part 2

Last time, on The Year of Living Spicily:

After a sushi dinner for a friend's birthday, Aaron found himself with a bunch of leftover fish and a bunch of leftover rice. (Not sushi rice, actually, but rice from an earlier meal.) For reasons best ignored, he decided to take the easy way out and just follow some recipes. Yesterday, he talked about the fish he made, which turned out fairly mediocre because of a problem with the spicing and a mistake he made when cooking. Today he'll talk about the rice, which (spoiler alert!) come out really well, and tomorrow he'll talk about what he did the next day, when he realized that he STILL had a bunch of leftover fish and rice, and was pretty sure he could fix the mistakes he made the first time around.

Also, yesterday he referred to himself as "I"... it seems that today he's referring to himself as "he". Tomorrow, maybe he'll just say "Aaron", as in "AARON SMASH!" or "AARON LIGHTLY BRAISE PRAWNS EN CROUTE!"

I wonder what prawns en croute are? I hope they get braised, or Aaron is going to feel really ignorant.


You know, I love the idea of the Hulk as a chef. What's not to like? You've got huge, huge hands with a tiny, tiny spatula. You've got the Green Goliath in a goofy chef's hat and a "KISS CHEF!" apron. You've got sous-chefs cowering in terror any time the slightest thing goes wrong. And, inevitably, you've got the Hulk destroying the kitchen.

Oh! Oh! Oh! And then, and then, you've got Hulk calming down, putting his hand over his mouth, and saying "OH NO! HULK'S SOUFFLE!", delicately tiptoeing over to a miraculously undamaged oven, opening it with the gentlest of touches, and finding his souffle magically unharmed. At which point Hulk will sigh, lean against a counter, which will shift because he's a huge monster, and a tiny, tiny measuring spoon will tinkle to the floor, making the slightest of noises... and causing the souffle to loudly deflate.

Which of course causes the Hulk to go on another rampage.


I would watch a weekly cooking show starring the Hulk religiously.


OH MY GOD. It could be "Gamma-Ray Cooking with Bruce Banner", a Good Eats clone where the brilliant Dr. Bruce Banner explains to us the science behind cooking. Of course, what the fools at the Food Network DIDN'T know when they signed their new star was that Dr. Bruce Banner is the puny human form of THE INCREDIBLE HULK. During the first episode, something went wrong, it got caught on camera, they retitled the show, and now HULK COOK! has the highest ratings - and insurance costs - of any cooking show in history. Airing Wednesdays at 10, only on The Food Network.

What the hell was I talking about? Watergate or something? Oh, yeah. Fried rice. I bet that's going to be way more interesting than a cooking show starring The Hulk. I tell you what, after spending an hour thinking about how awesome it would be to have the job of building a Hulk-resistant kitchen, I'm really eager to tell you the story of how I fried some damned rice.

wheeee. fried rice.

I'm not saying it was bad. Actually, it was really good, for totally non-Hulk prepared foodstuffs. Like I said yesterday, fried rice is much easier to make than you'd think, and a really delicious way to deal with leftover rice, which is otherwise fairly yucky. If you've got a wok (like I do) but are fairly intimidated by it (like I am) it's also a really good introduction to the differences between cooking on a wok and cooking on the pots and pans we're used to.

I'm sorry... just give me a minute. I'm still mostly thinking about how awesome The Hulk is. Here's the link to the recipe in the meantime.

http://www.ehow.com/how_2177319_kashmir-turmeric-fried-rice.html

Actually, now that I go back and read the recipe, I think the whole premise of this meal - that I was too tired to think and just blindly followed the recipe - was a bit wrong.

Sorry, what I meant to say was "PUNY RECIPE LEAVE HULK ALONE! HULK SMASH RECIPE! RAAAAGH!"


What I learned in my previous experiments in fried ricery is that you want fried rice to have spent the night in the refrigerator. That gives it some time to dry out - it doesn't cook up as well if it's wet, and it definitely loses some of its texture. (The first time I tried fried rice, it was with fresh-cooked rice. It wasn't bad, but it definitely wasn't really fried rice.) I'm also going to guess that heat is an issue as well; with steamy-hot rice there's going to be a limited amount of additional heat you can put in before you start wrecking it; with cold rice, you can really throw some heat into it. The recipe as written uses a regular frying pan, which just doesn't get as hot as a wok, and doesn't have nearly as much surface area - in other words, it isn't nearly as good at transferring a lot of heat into something that you can spread out (such as rice) as a wok is. Long story short? I used a wok.


The thing about The Hulk is - and work with me here - he smashes stuff real good. I mean, The Hulk is the strongest there is! And you've got to respect that. Because if you don't respect it... well, the madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets. There's just something that speaks to the child in all of us in that.


So, my final recipe, based on the one above, is this:

Chop up an onion. Take some day (or more) old rice. Mix in turmeric until it is nice and yellow. (About .75 tsp turmeric per cup of rice. Or, just eyeball it.) This will be a little difficult - the rice is going to be solid, nasty, and sticky - so get a big bowl, and rather than try to stir, you may want to use a spatula and cut the powder into the rice. Don't go crazy if you're not getting even distribution - once it gets in the oil, it'll mix more easily. Get your wok fired up, when it's nice and hot - when a droplet of water shimmies and shakes its way across the surface - hit it with some oil. This recipe calls for canola, which is the average-type vegetable oil you should have. You can also use sesame or peanut oil - high smoke points is what we're looking for. Toss in the onion; give it a minute or two. When you get bored looking at onion, toss the rice in there. Use your cooking implement of choice to spread the rice around as much as possible, but not too high up the wok... you want it in the hotter bottom part.


I mean, Hulk is no Batman - but here's the thing. You can put on a cowl and a costume and a utility belt, and you still don't really feel like Batman. And I don't mean just because you're a pudgy nerd and are not quite at that "peak of human perfection" physique-wise - I mean, so okay, you've got your costume on, dude. You look like Batman. Now do something that Batman would do. See? You can't. Moping around in a cave all day does NOT count. You know what? You suck as Batman.

Go put on some inflatable Hulk Hands. (TM.) Look at yourself in the mirror - you look NOTHING like the Hulk. But you know what? You can now go around smashing the crap out of all your parents' stuff, and you can feel just as awesome as Hulk.


One of the neat things that experienced wok chefs (admittedly, on professional stove, which put out more heat than yours or mine) can do is use the shape of the wok to manage items that need different amounts of heat. The closer you get to the center, obviously, the hotter it gets... so you can keep things that need to be cooler higher up, while you blast the stuff that really wants the heat. Neither I nor my stove are capable of anything like that.


So, basically... fry the rice. When it's a nice even yellow color, and is just starting to brown - five minutes or less, if you've got a wok and a hot stove, maybe more if you're cooking not in a wok and on an electric range - you're done. The recipe suggests onion, tomato, cucumber, and coriander as garnish; since I was serving the fish curry I made on top of it, I just put it on a plate and poured the fish and the sauce on top of it. Like I said, I wasn't impressed with how the fish came out, but the rice was really stellar. This is definitely something that I'll be adding to my general repertoire (my god, that word took me three full minutes to spell) although the fact that it requires making the rice the day before means that it'll probably get made to use up leftover rice, not because I had the foresight to make the rice the day before.


Hmm... thinking about the "mixing powdered turmeric through sticky dried rice" problem - it would probably work just fine to put the oil in the wok, then put the turmeric in the oil, then put the rice in. But then, what of the onions?

HULK SMASH PUNY ONIONS!



Tomorrow: part three, featuring some pictures, less Hulk, and fish that has been upgraded from mediocre to delicious.