A Chinese meal without fried rice is just about as unthinkable as french fries without ketchup - you'll live through the experience, but there's something just wrong. One of my biggest frustrations about Chinese lauriats is that fried rice is served as the penultimate course, if at all (I am not Chinese, so kindly forgive this philistine); it would have gone sooo well with everything else that came before it. But anyway.
Of all the variations of Chinese fried rice, Yang Chow (as popularly spelled in the Philippines, but elsewhere known as Yeung Chow, Yangzhou Chow, Yung Chow) is my go-to favorite. And because it is so easy to come by in these parts, I never really quite bother making it, partly because of the required day-old rice (cooked rice runs out very quickly in my household), and mainly because a 24-hour Kowloon House is conveniently on the way home/delivers in less than half an hour (best deal ever of PhP32 for a half order which feeds two + a short order of lechon kawali with a soy-vinegar-onion dipping sauce to die for).
However, whenever I'm in the Western hemisphere where half a ricecooker-ful of kanin lasts a couple of days and I can't be bothered to move more than 10 feet away from my Bridezilla marathon, Yang Chow fried rice is the perfect one dish wonder (especially in Honolulu where several cans of Spam are always in stock). The one thing though that I hadn't figured out until recently was how to get the rice to be the perfectly hued Chinese-restaurant-yellow...the secret being an ingredient not quite Chinese at all!
My recipe here.
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