American fried rice

Oh, my God. Hold me. This stuff is good. All my favorite things brought together onto one plate.

Hot with habanero pepper flakes (grown on window sill), salty with fish sauce which is made from anchovy, sweet by the addition of small amount of brown sugar, tart with unique flavor of pineapple. Sour with unfresh white wine gone off. Flavor blasted with cumin because I just bought a new jar and felt like using some. Aromatic with basil because the cilantro I have is ready to toss out. All this at once! Like a party gotten all rowdy and out of control right there in your mouth.

White rice cooked the usual way; 25 minute on low simmer, 10 minutes off heat, covered throughout. This time it's not particularly sticky because I didn't intend to eat it with chopsticks, and looseness achieved by frying the grain in a Tablespoon of oil for a few minutes before starting off

Mushrooms in quantity. Onion, garlic, chubby hybrid snow peas, small harmless colored peppers, fresh pineapple, and of course, roasted chicken previously frozen the natural result of producing home-made chicken broth.

Shape with a moistened container like a tea cup or a bowl.

What? Want to know how to pull this off with the breeziness of a master chef? Fine.

Start the rice. You now have 25 minutes to prepare whatever ingredients you chose to include, which is more time than you need. Make sure you have a comic book or internet connection to keep you entertained for the additional minutes. Bored cooks tend toward meanness. Chop everything. Collect your flavorings. Decide if you want to include an egg or not. Go through all the flavors that can hit your tongue and imagine how you intend to cover them, taking care not to accidentally double down. For instance, salt could be soy sauce, fish sauce, or, er, salt. Sweetness could be mirin sauce, cane sugar, turbinado sugar, Splenda™, brown sugar, white sugar, honey. See what's going on here? You'll never make this dish the same way twice. Get the vegetables together. They can be fresh or frozen. Use whatever you have. Choose a protein, it can be anything, even tofu or beans. For my very first stir fry when I was ten years old I used a chopped up hot dog. Our Asian housekeeper, who was the person who taught me, thought that was hilarious. My flavoring was catsup which turned the whole mass pink and oddly overly sweet, she thought that was hilarious too. Turns out, she adopted my choices. Well, at our house anyway.

When you have four minutes remaining for the rice to finish steaming off the heat, begin heating the vegetables as a stir fry. The longest cooking vegetables first. Blast everything on high then abruptly kill the heat once they're all done which should be just a few minutes. This time, I used a large heavy pot rather than a large pan or a wok because I'm tired of things spilling out over the edges or flying all over the kitchen, and because I just don't care. And it's not like I was on television or anything. The last thing added is the rice freshly opened from the steaming pot or an egg worked into the mass. That is all. It's fun!

Ohferchristsake! Just realized. The whole point of making this dish was to use up some of the prewashed slaw mix that I was forced to buy in quantity. And I forgot to include it! What a dunce.