Easy Chicken Fried Rice

The first anniversary of Hurricane Maria. September 20th will be one year since the storm that destroyed Puerto Rico and changed everything — Mami location, my sleep, my relationship with the island, the sound of silence on a phone that would not ring for eleven days. I have been thinking about it all week. Not thinking — remembering. The difference between thinking and remembering is that thinking is voluntary and remembering is not. The memories come when they come, uninvited, unannounced, like a hurricane. You cannot prepare for them. You can only stand in the middle and wait for them to pass.

I stood in my kitchen on Thursday night — the night before the anniversary — and I made arroz con pollo in a fifty-gallon pot. Not in my home kitchen. In my imagination. In the memory of that church parking lot in Bayamon, where I cooked for hundreds of people who had lost everything, feeding them with Mami recipes in a disaster zone that was my homeland. I stood in my Hartford kitchen and I could taste the smoke and the rain and the concrete dust and the gratitude of people eating their first hot meal in days. The memory tastes like sofrito and tears.

On Thursday the twentieth, Hartford held a vigil for Puerto Rico. Community leaders, church members, families from the diaspora gathered at Bushnell Park. I brought food — what else would I bring? I brought pasteles and arroz con gandules and coquito, because Puerto Rican grief is expressed in food the way other cultures express it in flowers or silence. We eat our grief. We cook our grief. We serve our grief on a plate with tostones and we hand it to a stranger and we say, Eat, because eating is surviving and surviving is what we do.

Mami did not come to the vigil. She stayed in her apartment. I brought her food afterward and sat with her and we did not talk about the hurricane. We talked about Lucas. We talked about the weather. We talked about nothing. We circled the anniversary the way we circle everything painful — by walking around it carefully, together, with food as our compass. The hurricane was a year ago. The tarp is still on the house in Bayamon. Mami is in Hartford. The roof held here. The sofrito survived. We survived. This is what we say on the anniversary: we survived. Not healed. Not recovered. Survived. It is a different word and it is the right word and it is enough.

After the vigil, after sitting with Mami, after circling the anniversary one more careful time, I came home and I needed to cook something simple — something that did not ask anything of me emotionally but still kept my hands moving, kept the kitchen warm, kept me tethered to the act of feeding. Arroz con pollo fed hundreds in that Bayamón parking lot; this easy chicken fried rice is what I make when I am alone and the grief is quieter and I just need rice in a pan and the smell of something good filling the apartment. Rice is rice is rice — it is the constant, the comfort, the thing that survived with us.

Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 20 min | Total Time: 35 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

2 cups cooked long-grain white rice, preferably day-old and chilled
1 lb boneless, skinless chicken breast, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
2 tablespoons vegetable oil, divided
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup frozen peas and carrots, thawed
3 cloves garlic, minced
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
3 green onions, sliced
Salt to taste

Instructions

Cook the chicken. Heat 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil in a large skillet or wok over medium-high heat. Add the chicken pieces, season with salt and pepper, and cook for 5–6 minutes, stirring occasionally, until cooked through and lightly golden. Transfer to a plate and set aside.
Scramble the eggs. Add a small drizzle of oil to the same pan if needed. Pour in the beaten eggs and scramble over medium heat until just set, about 1–2 minutes. Break into small pieces and push to the side of the pan.
Sauté the aromatics and vegetables. Add the remaining tablespoon of vegetable oil. Add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds until fragrant. Add the peas and carrots and stir-fry for 2 minutes.
Add the rice. Add the chilled cooked rice to the pan, breaking up any clumps with a spatula. Stir everything together and press the rice against the pan to let it toast slightly, about 3–4 minutes.
Season and combine. Return the cooked chicken to the pan. Drizzle the soy sauce and sesame oil over everything and toss well to coat. Cook for another 2 minutes until heated through and evenly seasoned.
Finish and serve. Taste and adjust salt as needed. Remove from heat, scatter the sliced green onions over the top, and serve hot directly from the pan.

Nutrition (per serving)

Easy Chicken Fried Rice — The Rice That Feeds, the Rice That Remembers