Vegan Fried Rice

Vegan fried rice

Tonight we decided to recreate fried rice without the msg, eggs, or meat products that you usually find at a Chinese restaurant. This recipe took a lot of prep time, but honestly, you could probably do most of it the night before and then just throw everything together after work on the stove.

Fried Rice: (serves 6-8 people; aka A LOT of leftovers)

• 2 cups of COOKED rice (we used brown basmati) - My mom recommends day-old rice...that probably would have helped keep the rice from getting sticky.
• 1/2 bag Frozen veggies (we bought a bag that had carrots, peas, corn and green beans)
• 1/2 an onion diced (we used red onion because we had one, but any kind will do- some people recommend scallions)
• 1 package water chesnuts, drained
• 2 cups diced mushroom
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• salt and pepper, to taste
• 3 tablespoons Earth Balance for the wok (you can also just use the sesame oil)
• 1 block extra firm tofu- diced and fried (after I press and dice the tofu, I lightly coat the small pieces in cornstarch to make sure they fry crispy)

fffffNOTE: I also added Sriracha sauce to the tofu while I was frying it to make our fried rice spicy. The color of hhhhhhhhhhhh the sauce plus the oil in the pan really made the tofu look like eggs.

Sauce: (the sauce measurements are give and take - add more or less depending on how much seasoning you want, we had a lot of rice so we needed a lot of sauce!)

1. 8 tablespoons soy sauce
2. 6 teaspoons hoisin sauce
3. 5 teaspoons sesame seed oil
4. 5 tablespoons rice vinegar

Equipment:

1. Wok
2. Frying pan (for tofu)
3. Sauce pan for rice

Cooking the Rice:
After waiting 45 minutes for the rice to cook (we really should have done that the night before) and chopping alllllll the veggies we were ready to start frying! Mansoor took over the wok while I handled the tofu (see tofu directions above).

All our veggies, ready to go!

• First: add your onions and garlic to the wok with the Earth Balance and let them saute for about 5 minutes until they are soft.
  
• Then: add the mushrooms and water chestnuts and cook an additional 5 minutes until the mushrooms seem cooked.
• Next: we added the rice to the wok along with our sauce mixture.

gggggggg NOTE: We added ALL our rice at once, which made it REALLY hard to get it to ffffffffffffffffffffff have the "fried"feeling. We recommend adding a little at a time so you can fffffffffffffffffffffffreally get your rice nice and fried.

• Last: we added our frozen vegetables and tofu. We let everything cook for a good 15 minutes before caving in and eating.
  

Overall, the rice was a hit! We both added more soy sauce and sriracha sauce to our rice as we ate, but we were ok with that. We served our rice with frozen egg rolls, which this brand was vegan and DELICIOUS, I was super impressed and would buy them again in a heartbeat.

Best eggrolls ever.