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Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Pork Fried *Rice*

It's been awhile since I've done anything with my food blog..... And I figured out why today... It's impossible to take good pictures and be able to cook all at the same time! Worse yet, now that my hubby is working eves, I have no one to take my pictures! However, I do want to pay more attention to my blog and give it some love, so I decided to try taking a few pictures of what I had prepped and then talking about the dish some.

One of my goals this year has been to work on eating less processed food. We are already pretty much well on our way as most of the food I now buy is from a CSA that I belong to called *Bear's Honeypot*. Bear and his wife Karrie strive to provide the freshest food year round to those who order from them. I got involved with Bear's about two years ago when my doctor asked me to give stronger consideration to my diet due to some health issues that may develop for me down the road. We've always eaten pretty fresh, but now the majority of our food is the freshest we can get. Bear's has become sort of a sensation here...and the amazing thing is, the business has grown due to Facebook. Just amazing.

Last week saw us get pretty much a boatload of veggies in our share. So many that I really needed to figure out what to do with some of them since there was only so much we could eat at a sitting. In my quest for less carbs, that crazy website Pinterest kept coming up with *Fried Rice* made with cauliflower. My initial thought of this was *are you kidding?* Seriously, the only way I ever ate cauliflower as a kid was swimming in cheese or cooked to the point of mush! (My mother, God love her, thinks that a pressure cooker makes everything taste good!) For that reason, it was never really a favorite vegetable of mine at all. I really avoided it like the plague!

Our share the previous week had this beautiful cauliflower in it. I really didn't know what to do with it at all. I was afraid that it was going to go bad and I would end up putting it in the compost pile. I started searching for a recipe last week and the main one that came up was the Paleo happy recipe called Pork Fried *Rice*. The next load of veggies came in last week and lo and behold, there was still a lonely cauliflower staring at me from the fridge! There were also mushrooms, spinach, purple carrots, spring onions, free range eggs, and garlic. I had some boneless pork ribs in the basement freezer and some frozen peas and thought I would give it a chance. The recipe consists of the following:
1 cauliflower head
3 carrots (I had purple ones, but any will do)
1 cup baby spinach
1 small onion
3 cloves of garlic
1 cup of mushrooms
5 spring onions
3 boneless ribs (pre-marinated in a low sodium soy)
2 free range eggs
1/2 cup or so frozen peas
Organic Shoyu or soy sauce
sesame oil

Now this is where it gets a little strange. I went looking for how to *rice* this cauliflower. I found all sorts of methods. The one I selected was the blender method. I cut the cauliflower up and stuck it in my blender (I have a Cuisinart with a pulse button) along with some water....roughly 2 cups. I turned the blender on pulse and pulsed the vegetable until it turned rice like. I then drained it in a strainer until I finished preparing the other veggies....this gave it ample time to drain the water.
I cut the carrots in fourths and hacked them up. I diced the small onion into pieces as well as the garlic. I placed all three of these in a large measuring cup. I washed the baby spinach and mushrooms. I quartered the mushrooms and put them in a bowl. I cut the pork into small pieces and set them aside. I sliced up the green onions, taking the white part of the onion and putting it in the large measuring cup so that it would cook. I pushed the sliced green scallion to the side. I broke the two eggs in a cup, added a sprinkle or two of the shoyu, beat the eggs and set aside.
I have a wok and a power burner, so I heated the wok up way hot, added some sesame oil and got cooking! I made the onions, garlic and carrots first. I then added the pork, a little at a time. I then added the mushrooms. Once I had all of it done, I pulled them out and started cooking the *rice*, adding some shoyu to it. I then added the spinach and peas, whisking it around with the *rice*. I cleared out the bottom of the pan, cooked the scrambled egg until done, then added the pork and veggies back to the wok, along with the green onion slices, mixing them up just a little more. At this point, my son Josh came in and said what are we having....lol, I told him *Fried Rice* with cauliflower. He looked at me like I had two heads. He proceeded to try it and come back for seconds. This means it's a winner. I have to say, it was pretty darned tasty!