If you’ve followed my site and seen my recipes before, you’ll know that I seldom share a story with my recipes (like everyone, I hate scrolling through a long narrative to get to the ingredients list). However, just this one time, I hope you’ll indulge me so that I can share how this recipe came to be. I promise you it’s a sweet little story…

For the past two summers, my husband and I have hosted “Skill School” for our kids and our friends’ kids. We drew up a list of all the essential life skills we wanted them to have before leaving home, then set about finding fun ways to teach them. The result has been some very popular evenings spent at our home learning things like car maintenance basics and changing a tire; chopping wood, building and cooking over a fire; writing a letter, checks, and a resume; sewing on a button, ironing clothes, and tying a tie; basic woodworking skills and using power tools; and, finally, the class that prompted this recipe: basic cooking!

The kids ranged in age from 6 to 15, and we wanted to teach them a variety of skills like writing and following a recipe, chopping vegetables, sauteing food and working safely around a stove and hot oil, measuring seasonings, and cracking an egg. Fried rice was the perfect dish to teach all of those. We wanted each kid to be able to prepare their own meal.

Here is the especially sweet part: the looks on their faces when they tasted their own food, made by their own hands! Every single kid rushed to share their meal with their parents when they came to pick them up. Several asked if they could take home an extra serving for their family. And some of them went home and cooked fried rice for their family the next day.

And that’s why we decided to do this: to give them skills and confidence for the future.

It may seem strange to post a one-person recipe here, but if you have food allergies you likely know as well as I do how challenging the holidays can be. More often than not, I find myself packing my own food to bring along to get-togethers–which is where a recipe like this can come in handy! If you happen to want to make it for a larger crowd, simply multiply the ingredients by the number of people you are planning to serve.

Let’s dive in…

Recipe

Serves 1

1 Tbsp olive oil

1/4 onion, chopped

1 carrot, peeled and chopped

2 Tbsp frozen peas

1/4 tsp garlic powder

1/4 tsp ground ginger

1-2 Tbsp tamari sauce, to taste

salt and pepper to taste

1/2-1 cup cooked white rice

1 egg

1/2-1 Tbsp chopped green onions or chives, optional

Heat oil in a small frying pan. Sauté onions until they begin to appear translucent.

Add other vegetables and sauté until soft.

Add spices and tamari and stir to distribute throughout vegetables.

Add rice, stirring to combine. If you are using rice cooked and cooled previously, heat until warmed all the way through.

Crack an egg over the rice mixture and stir until well-cooked.

Garnish with green onions or chives, if desired.

Notes

If you are unable to use olive oil, you can substitute for any other cooking oil. Sesame oil might add a nice flavor, too.

The beauty of this recipe is that you can sub in or out whatever vegetables you’d prefer! If you don’t like any of these, add what you do enjoy.

It can be a lot of work to chop veggies, and that might be the hardest part of this recipe (which otherwise cooks up in under 10 minutes if you have rice made ahead). To cut back on work and time, there’s no shame in using frozen chopped vegetables. If you want to do the work yourself, consider using a food processor or slap chop to make things easier.

I use tamari sauce in the original recipe because I have celiac disease and I’ve found I like tamari better than gf soy sauce. That being said, feel free to season how you prefer and according to your food allergies/intolerances. Fish sauce might be an interesting twist here!

We used white rice with the kids only because it was cheap and something we thought they would be more familiar with. But this would work equally well with brown rice or another grain of your choice. If you really want to save energy, no one here will judge you for using ready rice, either!

Traditional fried rice usually has an egg, but it’s not essential (and this is far from “traditional fried rice, anyway)! Feel free to use an egg substitute, or omit the egg altogether.

We used chives with the kids because it was the height of summer and they were growing in our garden (an excuse to teach them another skill: harvesting and cooking foods you grow yourself). Fried rice actually usually has green onions. Or, if you’re not really the onion type, you can just skip them and dive right in without garnish.

Enjoy!