I have always been quite intimidated to make Chinese food at home. If you typically eat out at a Chinese restaurant, or even Panda Express, you’re going to choose two or three entrées along with a side of ham fried rice or lo mein noodles and you get such a variety of flavors and textures. It would cost far more money to make all those different dishes at home than to order that takeout and of course it would take a lot more time as well. 

One thing I have found, though, to have all those flavors for a fraction of the cost is simply to make the fresh ham fried rice at home and find the rest in your freezer. There are so many good options for Chinese entrées in the freezer section at your favorite stores. When you pair this rice I will share at the bottom along with your favorite frozen entrées it tastes even better than takeout and is cheaper too. 


I think anybody who’s been shopping at Trader Joe’s has probably heard by now how good their mandarin chicken is. They have several good Chinese food entrées in their freezer section but this one is by far my favorite. I also recently got some honey walnut shrimp and delicious chicken cilantro wontons in the freezer section at my local Costco. Of course there are other frozen Chinese entrées and sides you can get from grocery stores such as spring rolls, egg rolls and teriyaki chicken to name a few


Now let’s get to that rice recipe, shall we? One thing I like about this recipe is just how simple it is. I pretty much always have these ingredients on hand, and it’s quite flexible to substitute ingredients or omit them if you don’t have them all. For example, if you don’t have a bag of frozen peas and corn stashed in your freezer you can grate half a carrot into your rice and it will turn out wonderfully! It would also be delicious without the ham, you could swap that out for chicken instead or just completely omit it.

I checked out several recipes before deciding on this one, but one thing that was common with all the recipes was that for the very best flavor, they said to use cold rice from the fridge. All of the times I have made it, I have just whipped up some rice in the instant pot and taken it straight over to my pan filled with the ham, eggs, and other goodies. It has always tasted perfect so I’m not sure why they say that, but it’s delicious no matter what you do.

The key ingredient that is what makes this ham fried rice so delicious is actually just the butter. You just sauté whatever veggies you are using, and quickly scramble your egg in the same pan and it makes the rice so flavorful.

I also always love ordering pineapple fried rice from my favorite Thai restaurants. You could easily add pineapple, chicken, and cashews to this instead of using the ham and you’ve got yourself a full blown entrée if you love that Thai dish as much as I do.