Kani Fried Rice

Kani Fried Rice

This happened when I wanted to make traditional Japanese fried rice and I did not have the rest of the ingredients on hand. It has since been a family favorite.

You will need good quality crabsticks for this. The kind that shreds into strings and not those that have the texture of a shabu-shabu squid ball when you cut them. The stringy kind is usually more expensive, about Php700 per pack. These are the crabsticks that are used for sashimi, maki, or sushi. They are also harder to find. We've gotten ours from Japanese groceries or Rustan's Supermarket.

Getting the right kind of kani is perhaps the only hard part of this recipe. Well, that is if you already have mirin or Japanese sweet rice wine, in your pantry.

Kani Fried Rice

Ingredients
2 tablespoons sesame oil
1 onion, chopped
2 large eggs, beaten
2 1/2 cups cooked white rice
1 tablespoon Kikkoman soy sauce
1 tablespoon mirin
8 kana crab sticks, cut up into 3/4 inch cubes
salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

Heat oil in a large pan. Saute the onion in the oil until translucent. Add cooked rice and stir fry for about two minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Add the mirin and stir. Add the soy sauce until all the grains of rice is uniformly coated a nice tinge of brown.

Make a well in the middle of the rice until the bottom of the pan is exposed. Pour the beaten eggs in the "rice well". Stir with a fork as if making scrambled eggs. When clumps of cooked scrambled egg appear, fold over the rice and stir fry until the egg is combined.

Add the crab stick cubes and stir fry until evenly distributed in the rice. Serve hot.