Cauliflower Fried Rice

Here is another amazing recipe from Arden at Real Food Real Life. You’ll never know you’re eating cauliflower instead of rice:

I’ve been reading recipes for quite a while for cauliflower “fried rice” and must say I’ve been favorably impressed with the reviews they typically get. While they are a real darling of the low-carb crowd (and similar, such as Trim Healthy Mama/THM), it’s an idea that seems like it would make good sense regardless — a good way to sneak some extra veggies into your diet — IF it actually tasted as good as the reviews suggest.

Well, I finally had the perfect motivation to try it out this past week — twice now, in fact — when I was gifted a bag of riced cauliflower. Now, just to be clear, from all accounts it is not that hard to shred raw cauliflower, either by hand on the big holes of your box grater or pulsed in your food processor.

But I’ll confess that neither of those techniques had yet enticed me to go the final step to try this out, so I say if you come across some cauliflower that is pre-shredded (or “riced”) and, indeed, looks somewhat the size of plump grains of rice, I encourage you to go for it. (It’s available in many grocery stores these days.) Totally makes this dish easy and, I must say, really delish. (I’ll even go so far as to say that we’ve had it twice now, as I mentioned, and neither time has it even occurred to my husband that it wasn’t actually rice.)

Interestingly, it’s also easier to actually cook since the cauliflower lacks the starchiness of actual cooked rice, so it’s much less likely to gum up your pan with sticky starchy gunk the way real rice can do. So far, very much a win-win.

Okay, how do you make this one-dish wonder? I think it’s important to approach it more as a technique than an actual recipe. I’ll list the ingredients as suggestions on a “per serving” basis to give some ideas for what you might want and how much of it based on however many you’re cooking for. Pick and choose by what you like and what you have on hand.

Also note that many fried rice recipes call for adding egg. Although I’ve eaten fried rice in restaurants with flat ribbons of cooked egg in it, I don’t really want fluffy bits of “scrambled egg” as some recipes call for and frankly don’t feel the need for it at all. If your preference runs toward egg, feel free to mix up one egg for each 2 or 3 servings and cook either with your rice or separately, adding into your dish at the end. For me it just becomes one more thing to prove the inadequacy of the surface on my non-stick skillet so I’m happy to leave it out.

Fried rice is a dish that can pretty much adapt to whatever you have on hand for ingredients — one of its beauties, in fact. But assuming you’re going to start off with some intentionality about your ingredients, here’s what I’d suggest as the basics:

• Chopped onion
• Chopped celery
• Sliced mushrooms
• Green peas (frozen works fine)
• Slivered or chopped colored bell pepper

Any of those could be considered expendable (although for me, personally, eliminating the onion borders on the “oh just why bother” but to each their own) and you could certainly add others:

• Sliced scallions
• Leftover bits of cooked greens like swiss chard
• Fresh spinach, sliced into ribbons or chopped
• Slivered or shredded carrots
• Any other veggie your family likes, cut into smallish bits

For all the veggies, you’re really only looking for a couple of tablespoons of each per serving depending on how many of the ingredients you’re using — a bit more of each item if you’re only using 3 or 4, less if you’ve got 7 or 8 going in.

And, lastly, while this would work just fine as a vegetarian dish, we enjoy a bit of “meat” in it, using the term meat very loosely. A handful of leftover shrimp work well or a bit of chopped or shredded chicken. In fact, almost any cooked protein — somewhere between a couple of tablespoons and a quarter-cup (2 ounces) per serving — will work great. Today’s version used some leftover shreds of crock-pot pork shoulder from dinner the other night. A can of little shrimp (rinsed) would be tasty, too, if nothing fresh is presenting itself in the fridge.

I’m sure a wok would be lovely for this, but is unnecessary. It works absolutely fine in a skillet — nice big cast iron would be nice, but my ceramic “non-stick” is larger so that’s what I went for. This was just for the 2 or us, so I think if you’re cooking for more than 3 or 4 full-serving eaters you might end up needing to use two skillets or cook in batches. It cooks up quite quickly.

You’ll need something to keep everything from sticking, so a non-stick cooking spray (my local supermarket has a wonderful inexpensive brand of organic canola oil, which eliminates the whole “all canola oil is GMO” thing) or a good drizzle around the pan of your oil of choice. Heat over medium high heat and then start adding your veggies — more “sturdy” ones first. So, onions, celery, and mushrooms to start. Let them cook a few moments, then add more delicate things like colored peppers, spinach, frozen green peas. Toss the cooked meat in to heat up, then add the riced cauliflower last. As you stir it about in the pan, sprinkle generously with soy sauce. If you have some sesame oil, drizzle a bit of that on it as well for flavor.

Taste and, as the favorite cooking expression goes, “adjust seasonings to taste” and voila, fried rice. Quick, easy, low-carb (should you care), good for you, and most of all — tasty!