How to clean the fridge

Vegetable Fried Rice - Sticky Style

This, for better or for worse, is my fried rice.  I legitimately believed I would be able to take this time where I've been forced to work from home to cook more and experiment with baking. I excitedly signed up for MasterClass so that I could learn from Thomas Keller and  had dreams of thumbing through all of my abandoned and dust ridden Cooks Illustrated magazines in the evenings. I figured I would have time to perfect the elements of cooking.  Making elaborate meals used to be something I thoroughly enjoyed, including the trials and tribulations of learning the vague descriptions of directions like "incorporate until appropriate thickness is met".  In the past, I may have undershot timing and fed people at 9 at night and made some poor substitutions, but the enjoyment always seemed to be in the process.  Unfortunately, during this stay at home period, while I had the best intentions, long work hours and what I'm deeming "quarantine fatigue" have left my refrigerator looking like this:  

At this point, I'm not even sure what's in there, but there are questionable smells and I hate waste.  I look back nostalgically at the days when I could roam the grocery store aisles, shopping for specific recipes without the fear of missing key ingredients or catching a virus that could kill me or my parents. Looking at this, I now feel sufficiently overwhelmed. Luckily my mother has been an expert at developing meals with creative substitutions. Most recently, based on her suggestion, I made a minestrone soup with vegetables on the brink of composting (soups are very forgiving she always says) and a mixture of beans that seemed questionable.  When I asked how it looked, the answer I received was "healthy". I would have gone with bland, but I'm sure I could have received less uplifting answers. I'll have to remember the ingredient list: fennel, swiss chard, celery, zucchini, onions, pinto beans and chickpeas.  For my next adventure, I decided to try to make fried rice. I hear you can fill it with any vegetable and eat it for days. While I was hoping to start this project immediately, all of my research suggested that I really should use day old rice so I decided that would be the plan.  

I have no idea what I was planning on making but I had a desperate need to immediately dispose of a combination of onions so I started with a random mixture of yellow onions, shallots, and green onions sautéed in some butter:

We're also growing this science experiment in our kitchen.  Jeff says he is going to plant it so I've left it there until someone decides to do something with it......

Current Science Experiment

Scouring the fridge for the most appropriate ingredients I settled upon an accidental purchase of 5 green peppers, carrots and broccoli.  I feel the most anxious about the broccoli but I've been assured it will be fine. "Is this enough color?" I say to myself.

If I had started Thomas Keller's class I might be better with a knife, but c'est la vie. Everything gets sautéed together until things looked cooked to me - I tend to stay on the "under cooked" side when it comes to vegetable.  The rice looks stickier than it should be but it's too late to abort so I move the vegetables to the side, add some more butter and plop in the rice.

The main issue I'm having is how sticky the rice is. I suppose it will all taste the same, but being particularly sensitive to texture I would have hoped for something more along the lines of what I've seen at teppanyaki grills. To add insult to injury I seem to be out of oyster sauce and am left with only soy sauce and sesame oil. I push forward with my dinner which seems to be spiraling out of control. Adding to my personal crisis, I forgot the eggs.  Thankfully, that is  an easy fix. I'm finally able to mix everything together as it starts to look mushier and mushier. It seems to taste fine so I accept some level of defeat with lessons learned for next time.  Let's see how that MasterClass goes.

farm fresh egg thanks to Crooked Toes

"Don't you have a wok?" says my mother.  Guess I'll just have to use my lousy Le Creuset pot.