• 1/4 cup cooked rice
• 1 splash soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons crushed pineapple
• smidgen of cock sauce

This snack took a total of two minutes prep time. This included twenty seconds in the microwave for the rice while retrieving the other ingredients from the fridge. Top the rice with your soy sauce then your pineapple and dress with thin strands of Sriracha sauce, be careful this stuff is hot. You can double this recipe twice to feed four people a quick snack.

If you want to get really fancy you can take the scrapings and debris from left over chicken and mix it in with the rice. Put that extra chicken fat and skin to use, don’t throw it away. You can accomplish this quickly with some boiling water by using just barely enough water to cover your chicken thigh or chicken leg (you’ll be amazed at how much meat comes off once you get into the practice of doing this with all your meat) and simmer for five minutes or so. Drain the broth through a mesh type cloth to save for later and use the leftover meat for your serving of rice.

You can tell when my pantry is getting low and these are my most favorite times to cook because it forces me to use up items that I normally don’t get around to using. I also come up with creative combinations that are usually not so bad. Today was no exception.

I started boiling some rice. About one and a half cups of medium grain rice. This should cook to about three cups. While this was cooking, I starte some butter in a frying pan after quartering a few white pearl onions. I love to prep while food is cooking. It is sort of a juggling act. I used extra butter in the pan, like one tablespoon and a half because I wanted the curry to have something to stick to.

I found a hot pepper in the fridge from Carl’s Jr and thought it would be a good idea to chop that up and throw it in with the butter and the onions. These peppers are quite spicy and flavorful so be careful with how much you use. One is plenty. A little teeny tiny one. After cooking the onions, butter and hot pepper for a moment, I dumped in about two teaspoons worth of curry powder. I could be wrong, I just eyeball the stuff.

Then I pulled out the large can of pineapple bits that I have been saving to cook with some rice. I drained these well because I didn’t need the juice to cook anything with. There was plenty of butter in the pan. Pineapple and curry are a great mix.

Right about this time the rice was done cooking. I just placed it on top of the pineapple-curry mixture and let everything stew together for a few minutes and gave it a few stirs with some sea salt to bring out the rest of the flavors.

For only using three major ingredients and two minor ones, this meal turned out pretty decent. Took me, maybe, thirty minutes at the most. Cooking with an empty pantry always produces food that you don’t have on your regular menu.

p.s. Some sweet basil and a splash of coconut milk would have been perfect with this. That would have taken this meal to the next level.

*update – I think that I will use a red bell pepper next time along with some basil to add color to this dish. It was a bland yellow, but yummy.