This is probably the fourth or fifth time I did this and this is truly one of the things I am grateful to my mom for teaching me. For my mom, rice and curries usually got old and close to expiring because she grew up in a big family and cooked for large numbers of people and didn’t know how to scale back for just the three of us. For me, the story of old curries and old rice usually goes like this: my mom or some aunti, out of love, will give me A LOT of food to take home after a party. Because I am my mother’s daughter, I also don’t know how to scale back food for two people when cooking. So I have a fridge full of food already and I get more food. Of course something is bound to go bad. But I hate it. I hate wasting food. Not only is it a waste of money but is a waste of a blessing that millions around the world don’t have access to. So what do I do? My mom used to make Khichuri. I make fried rice.
I don’t know how to make khichuri (a south asian rice and lentil dish, sometimes with meat and other veggies) like my mom but I know how to make a banger fried rice. Don’t worry, if you are ever over for dinner and you see fried rice, its made with only 1 day old rice. The proper way.
So normally I eat rice and curry by themselves until it smell a little funky. There’s really funky where you see organisms growing and then there’s like “oh it’s about to go bad” funky. DO NOT USE REALLY FUNKY. Be sad and purge your fridge more frequently so you catch the food going bad, earlier. When i find the slightly funky rice, I wash it until there is no smell. I take my very fine sieve and I run water through the rice and move my hand through the rice, making sure every kernel is washed. I let it dry in the sieve over the sink for about an hour and i shake the sieve every once in a while to move the rice around let the water drain better.
If I have left over chicken or beef that smells a little funky, I will do a similar thing where I will wash off the Masala and just have plain unflavored beef or chicken to work with. after washing, I will microwave the rice (and the meat, separately) for 2 minutes, just to dry off some of the left over water and to kill any microbes. I will take oil, onions, peas (an carrots if available) and 2 green chilies and I will fry them in oil until the onion gets translucent. If there is meat, I will add the meat and fry it in the onion and veggie mix for 3 mins. then I will add 2-3 eggs into a bowl, depending on the amount of rice I have to cook, mix them together and then add them into the pan or wok. After the egg is scrambled well into the mix, I add some pepper and msg to the mix. Just eyeballing it. then I will add a little bit more oil and then add the rice and mix everything very well. once the ingredients are mixed, add soy sauce, white pepper, garlic powder and oyster sauce into a bowl (i usually just use the bowl i mixed the eggs in). Fry the rice well for 5 more minutes. Remove from heat and add sesame seed oil and give it a mix. And you are done.
Some of you might be like “oooh what an interesting way of stretching ingredients”. other might be like “that is absolutely disgusting and why would anyone ever post this publically”.
I don’t understand why being comfortable or rich has to be wasteful. Am I struggling financially? Alhamdulillah I am not. Is it possible that I might struggle in the future? Maybe. I have seen people go from being millionaires to being penniless. So these kinds of penny pinching techniques are life hacks and can be survival for some. When we see a statistic like “5% of the worlds population consume 25% of the world’s resources”, that should infuriate us and make us more purposeful consumers. It means there is enough resources to sustain human life and that scarcity is an engineered problem. I can’t change the world but I can change my habits. And help people change theirs.
Faria Khandaker 