Our travels along the Road to Fitness continued tonight with a healthy version of a takeout favorite: Fried rice!
I pulled a page out of Christy Jordan’s playbook over at Southern Plate and did a veggie version of her chicken fried brown rice, substituting seitan for the chicken, of course. (And can I just say that when it comes to meat substitutes, you could do a lot worse than a batch of seitan! Its texture and flavor are great, and like many “real” meats it soaks up whatever you cook it with. Hooray for seitan!)
Instead of using instant rice, I used two microwaveable pouches of Uncle Ben’s brown rice instead, and heated them up for the requisite time before adding them to the seitan in my trusty Le Creuset. Then I added a generous helping of frozen peas, then some shredded carrots and green onions, and then the two eggs I’d scrambled at the start of the meal (I didn’t mention that, did I), and then finally some soy sauce and garlic powder. Just like that, a one-pot meal was ready for consumption!
We paired the fried rice with some frozen veggie spring rolls (well, they were frozen; we baked them, ahem) and had a perfect takeout meal for the eating right at home! No MSG in this kitchen, y’all. And plenty of great home-cooked flavor!
As advertised, the seitan picked up the rest of the flavors of the dish without yielding any texture or inherent goodness in return, and the brown rice did a great job of soaking up the oil and soy sauce evenly. The veggies made the dish downright virtuous! Road to Fitness, indeed. We’re rolling down the highway now!
:)