Grandma’s fried rice

Grandma is very frugal. Every time she cooks rice, she saves the extra rice water (Old way to cook rice is to put rice in a pot with a lot of water, after boiling a while, take out the extra water, and cover the lid with small fire until it is well cooked). After the cooked rice is scooped out of the pot, regardless of whether the pot bottom is burnt or not, she pours the saved rice water back into the pot and simmers it on low heat to make "crispy rice porridge," which she eats without leaving a single grain. Even when leftovers become rancid and taste strange, she doesn't throw them away, but puts them in a pot, boils them, and eats them. Mom tells her not to eat rancid food for fear of getting sick, but she says, "Grain is hard to come by, and it's a shame to waste it. Wasting food will attract the hit from thunder and lightning."

When I was young, things were scarce, and children had virtually no snacks to eat. Only during holidays and birthdays could we buy a lollipop. Sometimes, before the Chinese New Year, popcorn maker would come by. Adults would teach children to take two or three pounds of rice to popcorn. The popcorn maker would put the rice in a black iron cylinder like a shell, cover it, rotate it on a rack with fire underneath for about ten minutes, put it in a burlap bag, step on the bag-wrapped iron cylinder, pull the lever with their hand, and with the children's screams, a sudden loud bump and a white cloud burst out of the bag, the popcorn would magically fill the bag, with the aroma wafting over. The children caught it in basins or buckets and happily ran home with it to eat.

  

But after the new year, we children had nothing to eat again. In those long days, we dreamed every day of delicious food. Grandma had a way of turning waste into treasure. There was no refrigerator at that time, food was kept in room temperature. If there were leftover rice that had gone bad, she wouldn't throw it away, but put a little oil in a pan, pour the leftover rice in, and slowly stir-fry it over low heat. Then add some salt and keep stirring. Slowly, the water in the rice evaporated, and the smell disappeared. She kept stirring for half an hour or up to an hour until the soft, white grains of rice turned into hard, brown, crispy grains in the pot, rolling around and making a "hissing" sound, giving off the aroma of crispy rice, similar to crispy rice porridge. She called these crispy grains "fried rice." After frying the rice, she served it in a small bowl, let it cool, and let me and two brothers to eat it. It was crispy and fragrant, and it was my favorite snack. Whenever Grandma fried rice, we eagerly waited in front of the pot, watching her stir-fry at a steady pace. Holding back the saliva that was about to flow, we hoped that the rice grains would turn into brown crispy grains quickly. As soon as they were done, we would immediately scoop up a small bowl, unable to wait for it to cool, and put it into my mouth. The taste was more fragrant than any snack bought in stores today.

Grandma's teeth have almost all fallen out, so she can't eat fried rice anymore. She just sits there kindly watching me eat mouthfuls of crispy rice grains.

Grandmother never fried good rice, only fry rancid rice. We sometimes hoped that the rice would be rancid so we could have fried rice. There was always not enough food to eat, and it was really rare to have rancid rice, so the days when we could eat fried rice were of course few, no more than once in three or four months.

 

Grandmother always said that she was getting old and wanted to go back to her hometown. She said that she had to throw her old bones on the land of her hometown before she could close her eyes. When the Cultural Revolution began, because the situation was too chaotic, my parents sent my younger brothers to my grandmother's place and let grandmother go back to her hometown.

After my grandmother left, I often imitated her and made "pot rice porridge" to eat, which tasted very fragrant. Sometimes I also used leftover rice to make fried rice like my grandmother did, but because of refrigerator, I used rice that had not rancid. Later, after graduating from university and starting work for a long time, I had two occasions where I had leftover food, and I fried the rice in a small pot in the collective dormitory building, which made the whole building smell delicious. Colleagues and friends around came over one by one, smelling the fragrance and wondering what delicious food I was making. They said they had never seen fried rice made like this before and wanted to try it. After eating it, everyone liked it very much and thought that it was really a good way to turn waste into treasure.