When cheap and hungry, a girl's thoughts turn lightly to rice and spice and oil. Perhaps a boy's thoughts do also, but they get to do it in a sufficiently hulking and burly way. Yes. That is how they turn.

Actually, this whole business is an excellent way to eat when you have next to nothing in the refrigerator...OR DO YOU? John was making this the other day. Every time he said something like "this would be great if we just had some sesame seeds" or "do we have any mirin?", I immediately opened a door or cupboard and came up with the requisite item. It turns out we have quite a lot of tiny containers of various business hiding in various corners.

I didn't eat a lot of this, but was still pretty excited by the combination of rice with oils. You barely get to appreciate oil in general cooking; salad dressing, bread dip, or swirly garnish is about the pinnacle of its career. In this case, the oil and its steepings were the main focus of both taste and texture of said rice. It was an excellent plan.

Hot weather hot oil rice

oil, various
little hot peppers
mirin
sesame seeds
green onion
rice

Cook some rice. We had short grain brown. It was great.

When things are maybe halfway done cooking, start making stuff to put on the rice. Ordinarily we might make some sort of bean or pulse business for rice, but not this time. Hot hot hot hot oils!

Get out a sauté pan of some stripe. Put in some olive, peanut, or sesame oil, and add a couple of whole chili peppers. We were using tiny Thai ones in olive oil. Warm the oil fairly slowly, stirring every once in a while, so the peppers release all their flavor and create beautiful peppery oil.

If you are us, you may also have a little bottle of sesame oil already infused with chili pepper. You can use some of that too. In general I think sesame oil is the best idea here, because sesame is great. We used both the olive above and the hot pepper oil.

Warm all your oils gently until things are infused. Remove the peppers. Chop up a bunch of green onion and anything else you might want. Carrots might be good, and tiny bits of radish. Clearly, you can add nearly anything, but I like this fairly minimal.

Add your green onion to the oil. Add some sesame seeds to the oil. Go find some mirin and add some of that to the oil. I think John may have put in some soy sauce as well but I'm not sure. I would go for just oil. What else do you want to add? Cook it all together until awesome.

Is the rice done? Toss it with the oil until everything is coated and slippery.

Now you eat it.

Green tea; water; totally frozen crappy lager.