An especially good dish, we see it here garnished with mint leaves.

Upper left: hunks of stew meat with potatoes and zucchini, in a sauce of blended vegetables. Foreground: “casa grande” a rice-based side dish. Upper right: salad with avocadoes & other paraphernalia.

Cube steak provencal, garnished with zucchini & tomatoes, accompanied by a hearty homemade risotto…and some pre-packaged vegetables that you can heat up in a microwave.

CONDALEEZZA’S FRIED RICE (Indonesian style)

Ingredients:

1.7-ounce IndoFood fried rice seasoning packet

Cooking oil

2-3 cloves garlic

1 bunch green onions

1 onion

Salt and pepper

1/3 pound shrimp (de-shelled, pre-cooked, tails removed)

4-5 cups (approximately) cooked white rice

2 eggs

Optional:

Cucumber and tomato slices

Krupuk

Sambal sauce

Here’s a simple fried rice recipe. It is, however, dependent on having available to you a 1.7-ounce fried rice seasoning packet, manufactured by a company called IndoFood. In my experimentation over time, I’ve discovered that just using one of these seasoning packets is both simpler and yields a superior result, than somewhat more complex prescriptions that don’t rely on pre-packaged flavoring.

Use a pot or wok-like frying pan. Saute in oil the following chopped-up stuff: some garlic (2-3 cloves or a spoonful), a bundle of green onions, one onion. As they cook briefly over medium heat, sprinkle in some salt and pepper. Essential: about one-third pound of shrimp. I use the pre-cooked ones with the shell removed. Get rid of tails. If they’re larger ones, cut them in smaller pieces. The shrimp are important because, in addition to being delicious in themselves, they add a subtle seafood taste to the rice.

After all this has cooked briefly, start spooning in the plain white rice. Could be leftover plain rice. Once there’s a generous amount (maybe 4 or 5 cups) of rice in the pan, start stirring everything around and getting everything mixed together. Dump in the contents of the seasoning packet. (It’s a brownish paste, not powder.) Get that well mixed in.

Tip: Don’t have the heat too high. Periodically add a little oil and/or water, to keep things moist and to avoid the rice browning and sticking against the bottom of the pan.

Once everything is nicely mixed and cooked, use your stirring spoon to push the rice off to the sides of the pan and clear a circular opening in the center. Dump two beaten eggs into this opening. As the eggs solidify, keep breaking them apart. Then stir the bits of scrambled egg into the rice, to produce, finally, a heap of fried rice. Adjust the amounts of salt and pepper.

Garnishes: A few slices of cucumber and tomato at the edge, along with a dozen or so krupuk, if you can find them. (They’re an Asian snack food, like styrofoam potato chips.) If you like spicy stuff *and* your gastro-intestinal system does not rebel too strongly against its ingestion, use one or two spoonfuls of sambal sauce (chili pepper-based sauce).