Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

I don’t do a lot of food-related posts here on Electron Hut, but this onion fried rice recipe is one of my favorites.

Kyle’s Onion Fried Rice

• 3-4 cups of cooked white rice (if you’ve had takeout recently, leftover white rice works well too!)
• One whole white (sweet) onion, peeled and cut julienne style
• A bit of olive oil (~2 tablespoons)
• Salt (~1 teaspoon)
• Peas (I generally use one of those SteamFresh steam-in-microwave bags)
• Soy sauce (I use it mostly for coloring and a bit of flavor; Katt likes lots of it!)
• Fresh ground pepper

Directions

1. Put the olive oil and the salt (it helps draw out the onion juices) in a saucepan, then let it heat up on a medium temperature stovetop (on my stove, it’s a 4 out of a possible 9).
2. Add your julienne-cut onions and stir/scrape regularly until they start to turn golden (and no longer make your eyes tear up). The cooking process causes the sugars in the onion to caramelize, transforming the pungent vegetable into a sweet, delicious treat.
3. Once the onions begin to caramelize, add your cooked white rice and soy sauce. Stir the whole batch up and let it sit in the pan for a moment or two. Stir again and repeat for 8-10 minutes. This gives the rice time to absorb the delicious onion flavor.
4. Mix in your steamed/defrosted/etc. peas and let everything sit for another moment on the stovetop
5. Move the pan off the stovetop and serve with fresh black pepper. Keep a cover on the pan when you’re not serving to improve the flavor a bit more.

I’ve experimented a bit with adding some meats; my recommendation is to cut and cook any chicken or beef separately (small pieces, don’t overcook them) and add with the peas towards the end of the cooking process. Super chewy beef and dry chicken don’t add much to the dish!

The end result is pretty good for you, keeps for 2-3 days, and is delicious to boot!

Behold, Baconnaise.

I find that I enjoy cooking more for the process of combining ingredients to turn them into a final product as opposed to the final dish itself. Perhaps this is because most of the stuff I cook tends to be hit or miss. My chili was an eventual hit. After 6-10 batches of chili and some help from Cook’s Illustrated, I discovered that part of what makes chili delicious is an overabundance of chili powder and a lengthy cooking process. Before, I had tried various spices and additions to make the beef and tomato base more delicious, but nothing worked quite as well as this. Part of me was a little disappointed inside that I had stumbled across a solution for my chili flavor problem…I found that I much preferred the creation of the dish to actually eating it!

Some dishes that looked and sounded tasty in the cookbook (Honey-Glazed Chicken, I’m looking at you) actually ended up being rather terrible in the end. People make it sound like its virtually impossible to overcook anything in a crock pot. I have managed to do such a thing: during the preparation of the infamous honey-glazed chicken dish, we discovered that overcooked (aka burnt) honey smells atrocious. You know your dish has turned out terrible when you come home from class, enter your apartment building, and the first thing the guy in front of you says is “Wow, it smells like dog food in here!” We haven’t attempted any slow-cooked honey dishes since. Despite all of this, I had fun preparing it, even if the final product wasn’t worthy of human consumption.

My favorite things to make are breakfast foods; fundamentally simple, you can do a hundred things to jazz up an egg sandwich or make a new pancake variety. Chocolate banana pancakes? Awesome. And who would have thought that those little Costco brownie bites would be so delicious after being crumbled into the pancake batter? It turns out they’re mostly fat, so brownie bites just liquefy when you apply heat to them. Also delicious! What makes pancakes great is that they have a sort of neutral taste to them, so you can make them savory (with meats and onions) or sweet (with just about any fruit or chocolate) and they taste fantastic either way.

Plus, there’s something wonderful about waking up on a Sunday morning and smelling the delicious scent of bacon and eggs in the air.

Tim showed me a fantastic website called Foodler.com which catalogs all of the restaurants that deliver in your area. If a restaurant is currently open and delivering, you can place your order through the Foodler site and have it delivered to your door. Hassle not included! For people like me who hate the telephone, this is a godsend.

Or maybe not, since all of the food offered is generally bad for you.