By Joe Yonan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 23, 2008

My weekly call to a favorite Chinese takeout place for delivery, usually on a night I'm particularly tired, hungry and a little cranky (a combination I call "hangry"), comes at a price. And I'm not talking about the typical $18 or $19 bill.

I'm talking about all that leftover rice.

The restaurant's minimum requirement for delivery forces me to get two entrees and save one for another day. And since I try to eat no more than a cup of rice with the meal the first time around, that leaves another two or three cups sitting in my fridge, drying out and hardening as the days go by.

I'm trying to be more frugal, so rather than toss those telltale red-and-white cardboard containers when they're half-full, I transfer the rice to zip-top bags and freeze it, or I plan yet another rice-oriented meal within a few days.

My longtime strategy has been an off-the-cuff version of traditional fried rice, throwing those little white grains into my nonstick saute pan along with leftover meat and maybe some veggies, then tossing it around until things seemed done, more or less. But that started to feel too uninspired to do very often. And for this solo cook, all that rice started to add up more quickly than I could find interesting uses for it.

So I decided to raise my fried-rice game.

More than anything, I needed a good recipe or two, based on a solid technique and flavor base yet easily adaptable to the ever-changing contents of my fridge's crisper, which should probably be renamed the "rotter."

As it turns out, that required an equipment upgrade.

The recipes came from cookbooks by authors with chops: Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's 1998 book "Seductions of Rice" and Grace Young's "The Breath of a Wok" (2004).

From Alford and Duguid, I developed an instant addiction to a classic Thai-style fried rice spiked with fish sauce, chili peppers, lime juice and cilantro, particularly once I tried the authors' suggestion to top it with a runny-yolk egg; the dish became rounded, creamy and indulgent in addition to the requisite hot, sour, salty, sweet.

From Young, I boned up on my stir-frying technique and learned an easier way to add an egg to fried rice. (Most recipes call for making a separate little omelet, slicing it up and adding it to the rice at the end. But one of Young's recipes suggests making a well in the middle of the rice to expose the bottom of the wok, adding an egg and then stirring it all together.)

Because I'm a firm believer in an egg as the solo cook's most efficient protein source (less perishable than fresh or cooked meat, individually portioned, quick cooking), I had my two new go-to dishes.

I just needed to venture beyond a nonstick saute pan. Once I started delving into Young's paean to the wok, it was clear I should make the leap in that direction.

What an easy leap it was. I bought a Joyce Chen 14-inch, flat-bottomed carbon-steel number that turned as slick as glass once I seasoned it. Although things wouldn't exactly stick to my Swiss Diamond saute pan, they didn't come close to sliding around like skaters on ice the way they do in the wok. Where has this thing been all my life? After only two weeks, its insides already are burnished to a mahogany sheen, requiring less and less oil the more use it gets. I feel like an old pro, especially since I bought a wok spatula, a spadelike device that lets me simultaneously scoop and turn ingredients.

Young, a freelance writer based in New York, also often defaults to fried rice, which she calls "the quintessential Chinese one-pot meal," when cooking for herself.

"I'm not fond of sandwiches, so I often make fried rice as a quick lunch," she writes in an e-mail. "It's satisfying, and I prefer meals that add a variety of vegetables to my diet." Traditional fried-rice recipes often call for two cups of rice per serving, but Young's impulse matches mine: She uses about a cup of whatever vegetables are on hand and about a cup of rice.

It's not just a good use for the leftover grains: It can't be made any other way. If you try to fry fresh rice, the moistness means "it turns into a sticky mess," as Young points out. If the leftover rice is too cold or hardened from the fridge, she adds a little extra time to that part of her stir-fry, making sure the grains get heated through.

Duguid says she often fries rice when her husband is away, using leftover Thai jasmine rice that they, like Young, always seem to have around. "Even if we are doing takeout, we usually make our own rice," she told me by e-mail from Toronto. "It's ready in the same time as the takeout."

Although my new wok is certainly big enough to make dinner for two or more, it's even better for my solo cooking; I have that much more room to scoop, turn and toss without any of the ingredients jumping out.

Now if only I had better ventilation. The key to wok cooking is getting the thing smoking hot, and that has its consequences. I'm loving the ability to make something for myself in a matter of minutes that doesn't produce further leftovers, but until the weather cools off enough to let me open a window or two, I have to get used to eating my fried rice amid a light, air-conditioned haze.

Anything that so effectively soothes my hangry mood, though, is worth it.