Vegetable Fried Rice

This is indian chinese style vegetable fried rice. One of my favorites and an instant food if you have left over rice.    

Could there be a better way to use the left over rice than loading up with tons of fresh vegetables and make it complete sumptuous nutritional meal?  I had some left over rice from the previous day and made this yummy colorful fried rice. I added more vegetables to make it more nutritious.      

I generally cut carrots and beans into small pieces and keep them in my freezer. That makes it even more easy to cook this rice. All you have to do is heat the oil in a pan, toss in the veggies, add rice and spice it up with the sauces. As simple as that. It looks so colorful that its is appealing even for kids.      

Vegetable Fried Rice

Ingredients:

Cooked rice	1 cup
Carrots(finely diced)	1/2 cup
Cabbage(finely chopped)	1/2 cup
Beans(finely diced)	1/2 cup
Green onions/spring onions (very finely chopped)	2 tbsp
Bell Pepper/ Capsicum (finely diced)	1/4 cup
Salt	as required
Oil	2 tsp
Soy sauce	2 tsp
Chilli sauce	1 tsp
Pepper powder	1 tsp

Procedure:
Add oil to the pan.
Add the diced carrots, beans, cabbage and capsicum and stir fry them on high flame.
The vegetables should not be over cooked. When the vegetables are crispy and half-cooked add the rice and mix well.
Add soy sauce, hot sauce. Add pepper and adjust the salt.
Sprinkle the green onions on top and serve.      

Suggestions:      

I use the sriracha chilli sauce. But any kind of chilli sauce can be used.
You can even add scrambled egg to the rice.
1/2 tsp lemon juice can be added to the rice.      

It’s always better to use previous day’s rice. But if you do not have any left over rice, you can chill the fresh cooked rice in the refrigerator for 30 minutes before you prepare the fried rice. If the rice is hot, it becomes mushy when you mix with vegetables.      

I used the Julienne style peeler to cut the carrot into long strips, but I generally dice them into small pieces.

Chinese Fried Rice With Vegetables

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Spinach Rice

This is a simple recipe to make use of any left over spinach or left over rice.

Spinach Rice

Ingredients:

Cooked Rice: 1 cup

Carrots: 2

Spinach: 1 cup

Soy sauce: 1 tbsp

salt as required

pepper: 1/2 tbsp

oil

Lemon juice(optional) : 1/2 tsp

Procedure:

Finely chop carrots and spinach.

Heat oil in a pan, add the finely chopped carrots and spinach and let them cook well.

Now add the cooked rice, salt, soy sauce and pepper and mix well.

Add lemon juice and mix again.

Serve with raitha.

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Shrimp Biryani

We had a snow storm during christmas. So we were pretty much stuck at home. Could not go anywhere.

So obviously the next thing to do at home would be movies and food. Hubby darling did his part and got some DVDs from redbox and my part would be to cook some nice food.

I chose shrimp Biryani. It’s been a while I made a shrimp dish. I did not even know that biryani could be made with shrimp until a collegue of mine got that for lunch. His wife made it and it tasted yummy and when I asked him for the recipe, he said it’s a secret. This was a log time ago, and I still remember the taste. So I thought of experimenting myself from what I remember of the looks and the taste of his biryani and guess what? It came out really good and may be even better than his biryani 🙂 and now the secret recipe is out!

Shrimp Biryani

 Ingredients:

Shrimp( I used frozen cooked shrimp medium sized)

Basmati Rice – 1 cup

Onion ( medium sized) – 2

Tomatoes ( medium sized) – 1

Garam masala – 1/2 tsp

Dhaniya powder – 1 tsp

Chicken masala – 2 tsp

Mint leaves – 10 leaves

Oil

Yogurt – 1/4 cup

Salt to taste

Cillantro for garnishing

Lemon – 2 tsp

Red chilli powder – 1 tsp

Ginger garlic pastes – 3 tsp

Procedure:

Marinate shrimp with some yogurt, turmeric, lemon, salt and chilli powder for 20-30 minutes.

Cook the basmati rice in a rice cooker ( for each cup of rice, I add 1.5 cups of water).

Then cook the shrimp with lil water in a pressure cooker until you get 2 whistles.

Finely chop onions and tomatoes.

In a pan add oil,add turmeric powder, onions, mint leaves and let them fry. Add the ginger garlic paste to the onions and fry them together. Fry till the onions are golden brown and very soft. Now add finely chopped tomatoes and fry them together. Add dhaniya powder, garam masala, chicken masala( you can add shrimp masala here. As I did not have shrimp masala, I used the chicken masala I had.) and cook them t until you see the oil separating. Now add the cooked shrimp to the onion tomato mixture and let them cook. Add some yogurt and red chilli powder. Make sure you beat the yogurt well before you add to the onion tomato mixture. Keep cooking on a low flame for 5-10 minutes. Now add this mixture to the basmati rice and mix well. Add salt as required and garnish with cilantro.

Thats my christmas day lunch and we enjoyed the biryani watching the movie “Four Christmas”. Perfect holiday Lunch!!!

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