GUEST CONTRIBUTOR -- FRIED RICE

     "Hey, Mom," says my daughter Jenny.  "Have you ever made fried rice?"

     Jenny lives in Seattle with her family, and is a glorious, curious, inventive cook, and when she has a suggestion, I'm all ears.  So she made the following recipe, found somewhere on the great www, doesn't remember where.  I said I'd love to put it on my blog, would she type it up for me.
     "But you have to try it first," she says.
     "Tell me a story about it," I say.  "Our readers like to have stories."
     "Okay," Jenny says,  "I made this on Monday and had some left over the next day.  My friend Ann came over and said she was starved, and was there anything a person could eat in my refrigerator.  Of course, she was already poking around in there, pushing the milk and eggs aside.  She found the fried rice and ate the whole bowl-ful, cold, as is, and loved it."
     "That's a good story," I say.  "But we don't know Ann.  She said she was starved, maybe she'd eat anything.  Did your kids like it?  What about Will?"
     Will is ten years old and currently eating down the house.  But he is a kid, after all.  You know, eats sushi but not broccoli.  Fried rice isn't all that exotic, but?
     "Will loved it," Jenny says.  "Alli did too."
     Okay, that's better info.  Alli is thirteen, bit of a fashionista in her own way, pretty sophisticated and is, at the moment, busy separating herself from all things Mom.  She'd be a tougher critic, so if she liked it, the stuff must be pretty good.  We don't need to ask if husband Tom likes it, he pretty much likes everything that doesn't include fresh tomatoes.
     "I'll give it a try when we get home from Black Butte," I say.  And on the next Tuesday, I did.  We were planning to have fish, so I got some tilapia filets to pan fry, and in ten minutes from start to finish, had dinner on the table.  Larry frying the fish while I made the following (for two people, a third of the recipe)  Loved it! :

JENNY'S FRIED RICE

3 cups cooked rice, chilled*
3 Tbs. peanut oil
2 eggs beaten (for 1/3 recipe, 1 egg)
1/2 cup onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, chopped *
1 1/2 inch fresh peeled ginger* (chop the crap out of it because it's so fibrous)(Jenny's words, not mine)
1/2 cup carrots, small dice
1/2 cup peas
4 scallions
3 Tbs. soy sauce.

Heat 1 Tbs. oil in a large nonstick pan.  Saute onion for a bit and then add carrot, garlic and ginger.  Saute for a bit longer.  Push the veggies to the side and add a little more oil.  Scramble eggs, breaking into small pieces.  Add more oil and add the cooled, cooked rice.  Fry the rice with the veggies and eggs for 2 to 3 minutes.  Add peas and soy sauce and stir fry for one more minute.  Add green onions and serve!

*  I usually make up more rice than we need, and freeze the extra in snack-size baggies, so had some of that on hand for the recipe.  A good idea, by the way -- you should try it!  (Of course, I do have a freezer in the pantry, a luxury not available to every one.  I get that.)

*  Jenny's lazier mom has discovered Gourmet Garden tubes of ginger paste and chunked garlic, which seem to last forever in the refrig.   Yes, the real thing would be better, but if we're talking about a ten minute dinner, not a bad option.

 

alli ederer

will ederer

A GOLF STORY

Good afternoon, Sports Fans

     I'd like you to meet my husband, Larry.  A perfectly lovely man, who loves golf.  I mean it, he LOVES golf.  He started going out to the Como Park Municipal course in his St. Paul neighborhood when he was seven or eight years old with his little brother Al, or buddy Mike.  They'd sneak onto the course on those long, humid summer nights, when the sprinklers were on and the mosquitos thick, swinging their dad's clubs.
     Later, before he was old enough to drive to a real summer job at the paint factory where his dad worked, Larry took up caddying for a living.  Scrawny, lanky, sometimes hauling double, watching the weekend duffers, he learned how to think a round.  And when he got his first car, he, Mike, and Al would drive over to the football stadium at the U where, in the season of snow, a driving range was set up inside, beneath the bleachers.  Under the watch of Gopher coach Les Bolstad, he took up playing leftie, and the future was set
     Didn't play for the U, he tells me, not good enough.  Maybe, but having to work his way through college, these probably wasn't enough time in any case.  But he still lived near Como Park Muni, could still go out after dark with, by then, his own leftie clubs.
     Life happened.  He got married to me, strapped on the suit and tie and went to work managing other people's money, first for IDS, then Columbia Management out here in Portland, where we settled and raised our family.  Kind of a numbers guy, which would, later, prove to be a problem.
     He still got out a fair amount to the club in Tualatin, which he joined along with his friend Robb.  Got a good handicap, shot in the high seventies, low eighties.  Being in Portland, the two could go out all year round, sometimes negotiating a frost delay, enduring all but the most driving rain.  Mudders, you could say.
     And the years rolled on.  Kids left home.  We moved into town.  He joined the wonderful new Pumpkin Ridge golf club.  Robb, too.  A real golf club, no swimming pool for the wife and kiddies, and if there's a men's poker game, I don't know about it.  You'd have to ask someone else.  No silly day when women couldn't be on the premises.
     So I began to take up the game a little.  Me, I grew up in the country, no golf course for miles around.  Dad didn't play the game.  I never watched it on TV.  Therefore, an absolute tabula rosa.  I took a few lessons.  Went out to the course a few times at odd hours when my beginner's play wouldn't slow the foursome behind us.  We began to go to golf destinations on our vacations.  I learned how to manage my emotions when we were paired with strangers, that is, not to cry and kick my golf bag and so on.  And gradually I came to enjoy this infuriating, addictive game, although not really until I freed myself from the tyranny of the score card.  Just live in the moment, nothing behind or ahead of this one shot.  So I'm happy, leave me alone.
     Larry retired from his years of watching the ebb and flow of other people's money.  Now free to play as much golf as he liked, his scores perversely, began to climb.  Mid-eighties.  Okay, not that good, but.  High eighties.  Low n-n-n- well, you know.  Something must be done.  That's when he began charting, I believe it's called in the money profession.  Soon he began taking so much time between holes recording data that he forgot to notice the blackberries, ripe for picking, along the sixth, carpet of fallen apples on the tenth.  The rain.  Or not.
     "What on earth?" his wife would ask, as he noted the distance of the drive, greens in regulation, how many chips, how many putts, brand of ball used.  A system of pusses and minuses augmented the whole numeric thicket on the card.  "Why?"
     "So I'll know what to work on."
     "Ah.  You'll look at all these old cards and . . ."
     "Of course not.  I record the data on my computer."
     And work he did.  Hours.  On chipping, which had now been statistically proven to be the worst offender.  But his chipping did not improve, and his gloom expanded to fill our entire house, the garden, the neighborhood.
     At this point in the story, let me introduce Aaron.  He's our personal trainer and, I think, our friend.  He loves golf, too.  He and Larry talk golf.  Aaron devises special exercises.  They do not help.
     Aaron and I put our heads together and create a strategy.  Next time Larry and I golf together we will play a sort of scramble-type format wherein we both drive, then hit each other's ball alternately all the way to the green.  The theory is that he will not be able to record any meaningful numbers, although he will certainly try.
     To our mutual surprise, this proved to be fun.  If he had to blast a long iron from the sand where I'd put my drive, that was okay.  If his drive wandered into the rough?  Oh well, not his problem.  Suddenly we were laughing.  He could chip just fine, if it were my ball that had failed to make the green in regulation.
     We played that way all summer.  Robb was off in Montana, so I was the temporary BFF, the golf buddy.  And there must have been something about pulling my irons out of the fire, as he put it, which relieved the pressure of all those numeric evaluations to which he'd been subjecting himself.  He couldn't post a score for weeks, but he was making wonderful shots.  The kind that amazed those strangers we got paired with.  In fact, I got better, too.  Weird.
     I don't know how this story ends.  Fall is in the air, and Larry has gone to Spokane for a few days -- the rump sessions of a guys' tournament held every spring.  He'll have to keep score.  I hope he notices the pumpkins turning orange in the field, the rows of corn, the autumn sun.  We'll see.