Kimchee Fried Rice - Korean Fast Food

I usually try, on the weekends, to make one nice family meal for my family, and one quicker meal. This is the quicker meal. I guess, for many, fried rice is not really considered "a meal." But I use fried rice as a meal often - it's easy, you can make it more nutritious, and sometimes, when you are tired, this is the best that you can do - and it is INFINITELY better than fast food - so why not?

In case you think that fried rice is not "refined" or "gourmet." I will only say this - on Top Chef (one of my favorite TV shows about food) one of the challenges was to do something with rice - and this one chef, Dale, he made fried rice. And he did it with Chinese long beans and scallops - TOTALLY gourmet and refined. Fried rice is about what YOU put into it - you can make it as gourmet as you want.

The key to good fried rice? Good rice. We eat Korean at our house fairly often, but we don't always finish our cooker of rice. I personally dislike rice that has been sitting in the cooker overnight - so after our meal is done, I turn off the cooker and let the rice cool. After it is no longer piping hot, I actually take freezer ziploc bags and freeze portions of rice. These are handy if someone in your family decides that they want rice for dinner one night - you can simply pull one of the packets out and heat it on a plate for 2 minutes. VOILA! Fresh rice. These packets are ALSO great for making fried rice. I take out a few packages, put them in the microwave and again - BAM - rice for your fried rice.

This weekend, I didn't have very many things in my fridge to put in the fried rice. So I opted to go the route of kimchee fried rice. My kids love it, my husband loves it, and I like a quiet mealtime with no one complaining about their food. I had the great kimchee that my mother had made for me without shrimp paste, so I used that. I also didn't have any Korean pork belly (my normal first choice for kimchee fried rice protein) but I did have some very nice Niman Ranch Bacon. So I decided to use that.

These proportions are rough - I apologize, but I generally do fried rice haphazardly like this.

Kimchee Fried Rice

2 eggs, beaten
8 slices of bacon, chopped (feel free to substitute Spam, samgyupsahl (Korean pork belly, steak (cooked and just chopped),Bulgogi (cooked and chopped.)
2 cups of kimchee, chopped roughly. (if you have young kids, you can actually RINSE the kimchee drain out the water and chop this to reduce the spicy factor.)
1 medium onion, chopped fine
3 T of sesame oil
2 T of vegetable oil
6 cups of cooked rice (if it is frozen, you'll need to defrost it.)
crushed sesame seeds
1 bunch of scallions, chopped

Heat a frying pan. Put a bit of oil in the bottom and cook up the eggs as if you're scrambling them. Set the cooked eggs aside.

Put the bacon (or your choice of protein) in the frying pan with onions and kimchee. If you're using bacon there is no need for any other oil as the bacon fat will render and that will be enough to cook your onions and kimchee. I do add some sesame oil for additional flavor and some crushed sesame seeds at this point. Cook until the kimchee is tender and translucent.

Then - make a well in the center of your pan. Pour a bit more oil in there (this is to fry the rice.) Add your rice and cook it up, quickly while incorporating the kimchee mixture. Cook until rice is hot and all the ingredients are well mixed.

Turn off the heat. Add the cooked eggs, scallions and sesame seeds. We always serve ours with either meeyuk gook or gohlee gohmtang. Enjoy!