Fried Rice for Six

Wednesday nights are a busy night at the M household.  Mom works in the evening, dad is at work, and for the summer, I have Wednesday night town band concerts.  Which means that we don't overlap for dinner.  Which is sad.  It's hard to believe that when I was in high school I was almost never at home for dinner.  Weird.

Well, I guess Wednesday nights are supposed to be a busy night at the M household.  Seven minutes before I left for the concert tonight, the phone rang and the concert was cancelled because of thunderstorms that never really materialized.  All after last week's was interrupted by a thunderstorm during a severe thunderstorm watch. Last week's concert wasn't cancelled.  Oh well.

However, thinking that I did have a concert prompted me to rush through visiting old friends, grocery shopping, visiting mom at work, cooking dinner AND eating dinner.  No fun.  I ended up eating a "second dinner" of the cucumbers that I didn't have time to cut up while I was rushing around with mom and dad when they ate.  It made for one strange evening.

Good thing fried rice is a (fairly) quick and easy meal.  It's funny looking back on my original fried rice recipe.  That was right before April Vacation.  That was a long time ago.

I didn't do much tweaking of my original recipe, but I did double it to make it serve 6.  Tonight was actually kind of a practice run for next week, when I plan to make it while camping, and adding some shredded chicken breast for those people who are meat lovers.

I doubled my original recipe, starting with 1 1/2 cups of uncooked rice, 1 can of bean sprouts and half a bag of frozen carrot, corn, pea and green been mixture instead of exact doubling.  I also learned today that white rice doesn't necessarily double when cooked.  Good thing I paid attention to the package instead of going with what I thought.  I guess that's why I always ended up with more rice than expected when I made rice at school.

I also just made the rice earlier this afternoon to make dinner go faster.  When I make it for camping, I'm planning on cooking the rice before we go.

I also didn't run out of soy sauce this time.  Well, technically I didn't last time either, but I forgot I had a whole unopened bottle in my cabinet.  It made it so much better.  Oh my goodness.

The thing that I love about this recipe is the fact that it's basically all in one pan.  First veggies.

Then eggs.

Then rice.

Then everything.  So simple.

I'm not 100% sure that fried rice is supposed to be a sticky, gooey rice, but I approve.

Oh, and I also learned that some eggs now have an expiration date printed right on them?  I guess that could be handy . . . I never know when to get rid of eggs.