Every refrigerator has furniture. You know, the items that are virtually always there, fixtures of the 40-degree landscape that you may take for granted. In mine, it’s eggs — or was eggs, in any case — over in the left corner of the top shelf; the Persian cucumbers in the crisper; the Mason jar of herbs in water on the right side of the bottom shelf; and the quart container of leftover rice smack in the middle of it all.
Sometimes the rice is plain; sometimes it’s seasoned with salted butter and thinly sliced scallions. But it is always there, waiting for me, like a sofa in the living room. What is not part of my wider kitchen landscape, however, is a microwave. But like any scrappy New Yorker maneuvering about her tiny kitchen, I find a way. And that way is crispy rice.
Crispy rice — or leftover rice that is cooked again in fat until it’s singed and crunchy, yet still soft and chewy in spots — can add pops of texture to salads in lieu of croutons or nuts. My platonic ideal looks a lot like Alexa Weibel’s crispy rice salad with halloumi and ginger-lime vinaigrette: crispy rice stained marigold by turmeric, pickly red onion, squeaky cheese, baby greens (or better yet, arugula) and plenty of acid.
Crispy Rice Salad With Halloumi and Ginger-Lime Vinaigrette
It is easy to make this dish vegan: “If you don’t eat dairy, sliced or chopped avocado is a suitable substitute for the halloumi,” Alexa writes. “It’s not quite as textural, but it will provide great richness and heft to the salad.” I’d even add in some seared tofu in addition to avocado, if you go that route, to add some protein to the mix.
Hetty Lui McKinnon’s crispy coconut rice with tofu is another worthwhile destination for any languishing grains. Her recipe is an ode to crispy rice, a culinary pleasure enjoyed across the world: “In many cultures, the crispy rice found at the bottom of the pot is the most prized mouthful, known as concón in the Dominican Republic, tahdig in Iran and nurungji in Korea,” Hetty writes.
Or toss your leftover rice into Priya and Ritu Krishna’s tomato rice with crispy Cheddar, a.k.a. pizza rice, that rare combination of words that appeals to children and adults alike. Here, it’s the cheese that’s crispy; the rice mostly stays tender in a simple sauce of yellow onion, green chile and canned tomato. But it still delights. If I made a word cloud out of the recipe’s comment section, you’d see “easy,” “fast” and “delicious” in comically large letters.
But you don’t have to have leftover rice right now to have crispy rice tonight. You can make it fresh for the aforementioned tahdig, one of the greatest wonders of the crispy rice universe. Samin Nosrat’s recipe for sabzi polo, herbed rice with tahdig, nails the technique for a shatteringly crisp crust. Nowruz, Iranian New Year, is in three weeks: Practice your tahdig flip now!
And then there is Ali Slagle’s crispy rice with dill and runny eggs. It is a great way to stretch precious eggs right now if you’ve got ’em. And if you don’t, the crispy rice on its own — herbaceous, full of lima beans and topped with any combination of crushed pitted green olives, sliced pickled pepperoncini peppers, crumbled feta and lemon — will still satisfy.
Crispy Coconut Rice With Tofu
Sabzi Polo (Herbed Rice With Tahdig)
Crispy Rice With Dill and Runny Eggs
One More Thing!
I got a smattering of reader emails last week asking: Recipes for your green and sunrise juices, please? To be clear: These have not been through the precise, rigorous testing process that New York Times Cooking recipes go through. Like most concoctions we whip up before we’ve ingested caffeine or seen the sun, my instructions are based more on feeling.
What I can tell you is this: For the green juice, I blend roughly 2 big handfuls of baby spinach, 1 celery stalk, 1 Persian cucumber, roughly a ½ cup of frozen pineapple and a 1-inch hunk of ginger with 1 cup of water. Because I do not have a juicer, I purée it and then press it through a sieve. I add a little bit of the pulp back to the juice, a personal preference.
For the orange juice, I juice 1 grapefruit or 1 orange and blend that with 1 large peeled carrot, a 1- to 2-inch piece of turmeric root, a 1-inch piece of ginger and a ½ cup of water. Same process: blender, sieve and so on. I get about 10 ounces of juice from each recipe and drink them chilled. I told you it was tedious and inefficient!
For precision and feeling, check out Ali’s green smoothie, Zaynab Issa’s strawberry lassi or Sohla El-Waylly’s cinnamon date smoothie.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
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