My Chef's Hat - Chinese Style Shrimp Fried Rice

Wow, the last month has been absolutely insane. It's always tough getting ready for the first home football game, and this year there were added challenges with large-scale renovations on both the club and suite levels, and an "upgrade" by Suddenlink that required us to add cable boxes and new remotes to every single TV in the building. I tried hard to keep up with the blog, but of course OSU is what pays the bills, so that's where my focus had to be.  Now that I've survived the first home game, I can shift some of that focus back to the blog. 

 About 6 weeks ago I made fried rice for the first time. I don't know why I had never made it before, but it's really easy and very delicious. A couple weeks later I came across a recipe for Chinese Style Shrimp Fried Rice. I love shrimp, and at the time I was getting ready to donate platelets so I was on a binge to up my iron, and shrimp has a lot of it. 

 Many of the fried recipes out there say you can use regular cooked rice. But to me, it's not truly fried rice if you use Uncle Ben's. You need to use the steamed rice from Asian restaurants. Or cook sticky rice. I haven't taken on the challenge of cooking my own sticky rice, so for the foreseeable future I'll just order extra rice when I go out for Chinese food and use that to make it. 

Here is the recipe photo


 And here is my version


 This dish is awesome, and has tons of flavor. I'm guessing I didn't get enough coating on the shrimp because mine doesn't really look like the recipe. And I cooked them in the pan along with the fried rice rather than separately, so that might have contributed as well. But the flavor is all there, and that's what matters. I followed the rule of the fried rice recipe I originally found and cooked it with butter (well, Smart Balance spread in my case). Let's be honest...butter adds flavor. And as long as you use it in moderation, and especially if you use butter substitutes, the calories won't go crazy.

 I made this again about a week ago, and went overboard on the cornmeal/flour mixture, and you could taste the flour. Fail. I shouldn't have made it that night because I was in a rush and I was super tired, so I didn't take as much care as I normally would. Next time I'll fix that.

 Recipe courtesy of Creole Contessa
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