I made some dandy fried rice for dinner tonight. It might be the best I've ever made. I don't make it often. But, any Chinese restaurant in town would have serve it proudly.
I grew up in a small town in Florida. To the best of my recollection, there were no 'Asians anywhere around. There were no Asian kids in my school. There wasn't even an Asian restaurant in town. I went to college in Nashville. There you could find plenty of barbecue and biscuits and gravy and greens. I ate in the cafeteria because I was on a meal program. Near the school there was a Krystal, a Burger King and a restaurant/bar. If I went off campus to get food, it was most often either the Krystal or Burger King--I couldn't afford the other place. For most of one year, my boyfriend fed me. He was there on an athletic scholarship and got all the food he wanted. His sharing kept me from hunger that year. After three years I graduated, married the boyfriend and moved to St. Louis. I learned a LOT about Italian food/cooking. The new groom was Italian and his mother was an outstanding cook.
My point is that I had little if any knowledge of Fried Rice or any other Asian food. Eventually, I married my daughter's father. He had spent a while in Okinawa with the military. The woman to whom he was married joined him there though he did not want her to. Apparently she learned to make a decent Fried Rice.
I knew little about Fried Rice. I knew it was cheap. I knew it didn't take much meat. And I knew he liked it. One evening after a long day at work, I came home and chopped veggies and such to try to make him some Fried Rice for dinner. It was a case of a tired me, trying to be a good wife and feed her husband something he liked for dinner. Truthfully it wasn't good. I put the eggs in after the rice, a bad move. I'm pretty sure I didn't have the heat high enough. And, I had no sesame oil. I doubt I even knew there was such a thing as sesame oil and it's an essential ingredient if you want to make something like you might get in a Chinese restaurant. Still, it was an effort based on love. It should have been treated as such.
He ate a few bites of it and grabbed the phone that hung on the kitchen wall. He called his ex-wife and told her "Marci''s just made some driveway patch and called it Fried Rice. I wish you would teach her how to make it". And together, they had a good laugh at me and my "driveway patch". It hurt and the fact that I remember it more than 40 years later is a clue to how much it hurt. And, honestly, it's probably why I rarely make Fried Rice to this day.
