Cooking For One or Two - A Guide to Budget Meals and Stretching Your Money

Thrice - Red bell pepper half stuffed with fried rice. Sprinkle with cheese and pop in the oven for a delicious meal. Thrice-cooked rice.

Three recipes from one idea? Sure. Want to learn how to stretch your budget by using the same ingredients, without ending up eating leftovers? Read on.

(1) I started with some very basic ingredients: red bell pepper, shiitake mushrooms (canned okay), onions, green onions, nem nuoung (Vietnamese bbq pork sausage), and a number of flavour enhancers including a dash of sesame oil, crushed red pepper flake, Italian seasoning (or any mix of dried parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano, and basil), plus the old standards, salt and fresh-ground black pepper. With these ingredients, I made a stir fry, adding a bit of Oriental black bean paste and a bit of "vegetarian oyster flavoured sauce" (diluted in a 1/4 cup of water). This formed a broth, so I served the dish over steamed rice.

(2) The next day, I had all of the ingredients leftover, including rice. So I made fried rice, adding only beaten egg to the ingredient list. Okay, I mixed in a bit of hot Vietnamese hot chili paste (called sambal oelek in some Asian countries) because I enjoy culinary flame-throwing :)

(3) Realizing I had some leftover fried rice, I spooned it into a bell pepper half and snapped the photo you see at the top of this posting. Although I didn't do this, you can easily add some grated cheese on top, pop it in a pre-heated oven, and enjoy the result with a nice red wine. [However, making one portion is an awful waste of electricity. What you can do is freeze the leftover fried rice until a day when you are using the oven for something else, say a caserole or lasagna for freezing. Just pop in the pepper at the same time.]

Watch my Curry Elvis Cooks blog for these recipes, appearing soon.

(c) Copyright 2005-present, Raj, Kumar Dash, http://cookingforone-or-two.blogspot.com