INGREDIENTS

  • 1.5 cups of sweet rice
  • 6 dried shitake mushrooms
  • 8 oz of dried shrimp
  • 1 pork chop
  • 1 t corn starch
  • 3 T soy sauce
  • 2 small shallots, minced
  • 1/2 T minced ginger

INSTRUCTIONS

There are many ways to prepare this dish, most of which involve cooking all of the ingredients together in a big pot, and then transferring them into a large rice cooker to finish off.  In those versions, the amount of liquid can be hard to control, which makes the dish difficult.  This version of the recipe is much easier.

  1. The day before you cook the sticky rice, start re-hydrating the shitake mushrooms by keeping them submerged in a bowl of water.
  2. The dried shrimp also need to be re-hydrated, but that process can start as late as an hour before the rest of the cooking.
  3. Cook the sweet rice in a rice cooker as one cooks regular short grain rice: with about 2.5 cups of water for the 1.5 cups of rice.
  4. About five minutes before the rice is done, slice the pork chop into thin strips (it helps if you bought a boneless pork chop), and marinade it with the corn starch and soy sauce.
  5. Slice the shitake mushrooms into thin strips.
  6. Mince the two shallots and the ginger
  7. Heat 2 T of oil in a pan and add the marinated pork.  Sear the pork strips on each side.
  8. As the pork nears being cooked all the way through, add the shitake mushroom, the dried shrimp, the shallots and the ginger and mix well together.
  9. Allow all the ingredients to be cooked together.
  10. Finally, add the cooked sweet rice and mix everything together.  If it all looks too dry, consider adding a bit of the water from re-hydrating the mushrooms.

The dish can be served immediately, or it can be refrigerated and served later.  The ginger and shallots are not used in all versions of this recipe -- feel free to experiment with adding or removing them.