Kimchi Fried Rice

Don’t remember the chef who said this, when asked what his/her favorite dish he/she would cook at home after work. The answer was fried rice with kimchi. I stored that information in the back of my head until I saw this recipe in Curtis Stone’s What’s for Dinner. Curtis wrote that he was lucky to learn Korean cuisine from his Korean mother-in-law.

This week at IHCC, the theme is to cook a dish that you can relax and savor while lounging on a couch. So I thought of this bowl of rice. You can eat it with a fork, or a spoon or chopsticks. No one would mind the path you take to get the rice to your mouth, as long as you are sitting down. Even that can be negotiated. After I finished my first small bowl and craved for more, I stood by the stove and ate big spoonfuls of the fried rice, right off the wok! Until a voice inside started telling me, louder and louder, that I better stopped.

I can convince myself this is a vegetarian dish. Yes, there is carb. But I swapped out white rice for brown rice since you won’t find white rice in my pantry. Otherwise, I kept the dish close to Curtis Stone’s recipe. Besides kimchi, other ingredients are mostly everyday pantry items. You can whip up this satisfying, spicy, salty, comfort food in less than a half hour. Warning: Don’t make it when you’re hungry because you’d tend to overindulge, as I did, sitting down or standing up!

Supposed to chop up the kimchi, but I forgot.