Location: My tiny kitchen

If it weren’t for my mom, I would never thought of making fried rice with roast pork and celery. This fried rice is so creative and yet so simple. The idea of using roast pork and celery to make fried rice sounds strange but when used together, they become very suitable ingredients. I like to use roast pork that has a little bit of fat hanging on the meat. When the pork is fried with the rice, traces of fat are melted into the rice. When this happens, your rice in the pan is singing, “Mamma Mia!”.

This is for you, mom.

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To make this fried rice, you will need the following:

3 cups of cooked rice
1 1/2 cup of diced celery
1 1/2 cup of diced Chinese roast pork, with a little bit of fat on the meat
Soy sauce
Sesame Oil
2 tbsp of minced garlic
Black pepper

Prepare the rice for frying. It is very difficult to make good fried rice when the rice is too moist. To reduce the moisture in rice, use a long grain rice such as jasmine rice. Always cook the rice one night before and leave the rice in the fridge overnight. Before frying, take the rice out of the fridge to let it warmed up to room temperature.

Heat a non stick pan and put in 1 tbsp of oil. Put in the diced celery, 1tsp of salt and freshly ground pepper. Stir fry the celery until translucent, about 1 minute.

Add the roast pork and stir fry for another minute.

Pour the roast pork and celery into a bowl. In the non stick pan, put in 1 tbsp of oil. Put in half of the rice. Using the back of a wooden spatula, gently press the rice to break them apart. Turn the heat to medium and continue gently pressing and stir frying the rice until they are apart. This takes about 2 minutes.

When the rice has been mostly broken apart, put in 1 tbsp of minced garlic and stir the garlic into the rice. Drizzle in a few drops of sesame oil. Make a little space in the middle of the pan, pour in 1 tbsp of soy sauce. Let the soy sauce sizzles and quickly mix the rice with the soy sauce.

Put half of the pork and celery into the rice. Turn the heat to high and stir fry for a minute or until the rice is all mixed together with the pork and celery.

Repeat with the remaining rice, pork and celery.

Frying the rice in two batches prevents the non stick pan from getting over-crowded. It is a lot easier to break the rice apart when there is enough space in the pan.

To me, a perfect fried rice is when each grain of rice is on its own and each grain is infused with the flavour of soy sauce and pork fat. I don’t think I have achieved this level of rice-frying excellence yet. Nevertheless, my husband and I quickly gulped down one big bowl of pork, celery and rice goodness

Life is good when there are differences.