Cooking is a creative activity. It is the pairing of different tastes and textures. I love to experiment and cooking feels all the more like art, where the ingredients equate to the mediums and the plate equates to the canvas. Some days when you have not planned for dinner or lunch you really need to harness the effort to make something palatable! But these chances are where creativity can bloom the most. I love to make what I call "Dirty rice" dishes. Depending on your stance or opinion on "fats" and "oils" (lipids basically), this dish might not be for you. The "sauce" is basically oil that the rice soaks up. In any case, this dish is basically anything you can find in the fridge that compliments each other.

I call this dirty rice because of the method. I place the rice into the frying pan to get "dirtied" in the pan. I also call it dirty because of the way the rice looks: speckled with different small cubes of bacon and veggies. The dish is very versatile because you can use anything that compliments each other. I used a mixture between ginger and lemon as my main flavor profile. But the different combinations are endless. So please see my method and ingredients below!

Ingredients

For today, I found the following Ingredients in my fridge/pantry:

• Mushrooms,
• Yellow bell pepper,
• Garlic,
• Lemon (Peel and Juice),
• Ginger,
• Bacon,
• Celery,
• And Fish sauce.
• And also the rice.

Method

Chop the ingredients into small pieces

To make this dish, begin by chopping all of the ingredients into small cubes/pieces. I like to begin with the bacon so that the fat can render out. This bacon fat is a key ingredient to the dish.

Whilst the bacon fat is rendering out, chop up the rest of the ingredients.

Try and chop all the ingredients so that they are the same size. But do not stress too much. As there are too many ingredients in the pan for individual pieces to burn.

"Fry" the Chopped Ingredients

Take the leftover bacon fat, and some extra if you stored from the previous times you made bacon. I also used some coconut oil. This is not a healthy dish if you do not like oils/fats. I regularly check my blood work and my cholesterol is fine! But fats and oils make this dish. The more tasty your oil is (like bacon fat) the more flavour you impart.

Fry the ingredients in the oil/fat.

Add the Extra "Sauce"

I love to add some extra sauce. I use lemon juice, lemon rind, and fish sauce for that Umami boost.

Add the Rice

Now add the rice and mix. Make sure there is enough fat/oil and sauce to coat all the rice as well. I used Jasmine rice, as I find the sticky texture works so well with the oily/fatty sauce.

Enjoy! Be Creative with the Recipe

Now you can enjoy this dish! The nice thing about this dish is that you can make anything with it. Any ingredient with some "flavored" oil/fat will work wonders. Pair interesting flavors, and add any ingredient you want. The combinations are endless. Most important, experiment!