Shiny Cooking

Shrinkage. It’s not just for George Costanza anymore. Thanks to rising costs and a disinclination towards outwardly raising prices, food manufacturers are selling less for the same price. Everything comes in a smaller package these days, and not all of it is due to chilly swimming pools.

And in the process, mucking up loads and loads of recipes. Jerks.

But I’ve got a present for you. Spring tuna wraps uses 5 ounce cans of tuna, yay! Well, that’s because I sort of just wrote down the precise measurements today, but you didn’t read that, did you?

But it’s not spring anymore, I hear you complaining. Too bad. Up here in Michigan, it’s been a cruel cool cool summer, and peas, lettuce, radishes, and green onions are still going strong in the garden. Confession: my peas are sugar snaps, so I use frozen in this recipe, shh. Don’t tell anyone!

gah, someone get this cat off my countertop

Oh, wait. Hold up. My dad’s cat, who likes to come in my house at night, keeps jumping up on the counter to lick the measuring cup that had mayonnaise in it.

So annoying. I hate getting hints that it’s time to wash the damn dishes.

Okay, tossed the cat outside, now back to the wraps. I’ve always liked canned tuna, and missed it when I eschewed fish in the strict vegetarian phase. Even as a kid, a tuna sandwich was always a special treat and change from the normal peanut butter and jelly sack lunch. I would have had it in every lunch if I could. As a grownup, I finally found out how tuna is supposed to taste, via tuna steaks in good restaurants, but canned tuna still holds a special place. I don’t know why, because it bears about as much resemblance to tuna the fish as canned salmon does to salmon the fish, and I hate canned salmon.

Now, updated for grownups: brighten up tuna salad with tangy lemon, sweet peas, and crunchy bits of radish. Toss in some toasted almonds, splash on a bit of Thai chili sauce, tuck it all into whole wheat tortillas with leafy lettuce. Yes, there’s still mayo in here, and celery, and some green onions and…you get the point. A melange of springy vegetables ready for sandwich noshing.

Oh wow. Even at six servings, each tuna wrap is 242 calories apiece! Sounds pretty good to me. Read more on spring tuna wraps…

Hey, look, another super simple recipe that is super yummy.

I know. Fried rice is intended as a leftover-user. Day-old rice? Make fried rice with it! Unfortunately for the rice, fried rice is so good on its own that it gets made a lot on purpose here and never makes it to day-old status.

In fact, I make it so much it seems I’ve begun doing that thing where you tweak. I’d heard of this, where people don’t follow recipes directly and instead, like, change them. How odd.

What finally made this tweak awesome was green onions and sesame oil. Oh, hay (sorry, got horses on the brain), there are green bunching onions in the garden! Look:

The green in this fried rice is the green onion, peas, and broccoli. I always use frozen for the peas and broccoli, though I’m sure fresh would be delicious. Fried rice just doesn’t seem the place to be putting garden fresh peas and broccoli, though, you know what I mean? Fresh broccoli is meant for raw crunching, or light steaming, or broccoli salad. Fresh peas are meant for chomping right out of the pod, or quick cooking with a teeny bit of butter melted in at the end, and maybe some chives. But frozen? Go to town in the grocery’s freezer section. Inexpensive and more nutritious than in the produce department and will keep forever. Well, forever-ish.

umami — what?

The green onions added that umami the fried rice was needing. And I figured out a while back that fried rice must have sesame oil in it. If you don’t drizzle some sesame oil into the mix, it’s going to taste bland, no matter what you do.

And apparently, technically green onions don’t have umami flavor. I don’t care. I’m proclaiming umami to be a generic term for “makes it taste awesomer.”

the fried rice trick

I don’t know the right way to make fried rice. I’m sure there’s some proper method that I’m too lazy to discover.

So here’s the trick I developed: Read more on green fried rice…