In the past few years, everyone seems to have gone gaga over fancy acrobatics shows like Cirque du Soleil. Essentially, people are paying an arm and a leg to watch dancers in skintight leotards prance around and perform a few acrobatic tricks and worst of all, it is all packaged under some exotic sounding name with lots of strange-looking accent marks like "P" or "Kooz" (I don't know what putting a circle above the "a" means either). For me, instead of wasting money on some strange show with a name like "Wintuk" that sounds more like a Battlestar Galactica character than an acrobatic spectacle, I head to my neighborhood hibachi restaurant to watch the best kind of acrobatics food acrobatics. Think about it. You pay a small sum of money to get a front row seat to watch a hibachi chef perform gravity defying tricks with eggs, juggle pieces of shrimp before skillfully catching them in his hat, and of course, do the famous choo choo train and onion volcano trick and then you get to eat everything! When's the last time someone at the Cirque handed you a plate of teriyaki beef at the end of the show? And the best part of Hibachi? The fried rice. Even if the chicken is slightly undercooked, the theatrics weren't up to par or the onion volcano simply refused to light, you can always count on a plate of delicious fried rice to satisfy you during your meal.
So while I can't guarantee that the Collis chefs will be upping the pyrotechnics in the stir fry line anytime soon, try this recipe for "fried" rice that's got all the flavor of your local Benihana. 1.In the omelet line at Collis, ask for scrambled eggs.2.While your eggs are cooking, ask the stir fry line for a cup of rice and fill with the stir fry veggies they provide or choose your own (the standard ones for fried rice are peas and corn).3.Get a salad dressing cup from the salad bar and get your favorite stir fry sauce put in it or just grab some soy sauce.4.Combine the eggs, rice/veggies, and sauce mix well and microwave for about a minute.A final note if you are one of those people who actually likes Collis stir fry and gets a kick out of whenever the stir fry guy pours your meat on top of the rice and goes, "I put a lot of meat in there, brotha! Eat up!" feel free to just get regular stir fry and mix in scrambled eggs. But if you're like me, who could not be happier that the Pav stir fry pans finally made it back from being kosher-ized in Israel (yeah, that's really where they were), don't unnecessarily put yourself through the pain of having to part the Red Sea of teriyaki sauce in your Collis stir fry because they put so much in there.
