My friend Angela Chang is a great cook, with several cookbooks to her name. That’s a given, but I was still wowed by a dish of fried sticky rice she recently shared with me (along with some stuffed tofu and red cabbage, seen in photo at left). It was an unusual spin on regular fried rice, and I found it much more interesting. It seemed to have a gazillion ingredients! She started with brown sticky rice, and I’m not sure I’ve come across that before, although I’ve wondered if such a thing was available. Now I’ll remember to seek it out.
Angela says (with typical modest understatement), “It was just a little fancier fried rice, not really difficult to make. You saute onion, a little garlic (my bold experiment). ground chicken, chopped sausage, then add the cooked brown sticky rice and stir together with salt and pepper, soy sauce and a box of frozen mixed vegetables. I think I could make it even more aromatic by adding some diced seafood such as shrimp and squid.”
I still had a little rice and cabbage left when I roasted a strip of pork belly a few nights later. I cut that up over the leftover rice and cabbage, and added a little of the new Trader Joe’s Kimchee Rice to the bowl, too, the colorful orange-y one at the bottom of the last photo. Oh my! (I will definitely be playing with that kimchee rice again, maybe serving it with a fried egg over the top as the package suggests.)
NJ SPICE 