It sure is.

So, I thought I'd share with you my experiences with fried rice, and in the end, a recipe I found that works for me. Please ignore the sound of my heart screaming "Eat a piece of celery, for Christ's sake!"

In the beginning, I learned I loved Chinese food, which is actually extremely Americanized. There's certainly nothing wrong with that, but there aren't a lot of dishes you'll find in your local Great Wall buffet that you'll find on a market street in Beijing (Except maybe thin slices of cheap pepperoni pizza. That's authentic Chinese, right?). Heck, most of these places don't even have plain white rice on the buffet counter, which is a staple of the Chinese diet. Even the fried rice you have in China will be much different than the fried rice you get in the west. That conveniently brings me to my favorite Americanized Chinese dish, which is fried rice. To me, bad fried rice can easily keep me from wanting to return to a Chinese restaurant.

Often times, bad fried rice in a restaurant is the result of too much salt, or severely undercooked rice. The cooked rice used for fried rice should be firm, but not crunchy. Sticky rice is often overcooked (unless it's a sticky breed of rice to begin with, more often used in sushi and rice balls) and is unsuitable for frying.

When I find a restaurant with good fried rice, I study it. What's in this? Why does this taste good on my face mouth tongue? Why can't I stop putting it inside me and then crying because I have a tummy ache?

My earliest remembered experience was with fried rice in a very tiny Chinese buffet. It was yellow, and I thought it was quite good. Oddly enough, I came back to that place years later to the same rice and didn't like it at all. It was too firm and salty. It may not have always been this way, but I like to think I greatly enhanced my food senses in the mean time (directly proportional to my girth, no doubt).

I tried every Chinese buffet I could find (and some non-buffet ones, which are often more expensive, but better also.) I lived in Shelby NC (Home of Earl Scruggs - Co-Artist of The Ballad Of Jed Clampett. RIP *pours one out*), and there was one Chinese restaurant that ruled the roost. It was also terrible. Good, high quality Chinese buffets would open in town, and within months would fade away, with this crapfest called Chinatown remaining behind. But that was fine. There was always a good Chinese restaurant in any of the adjacent towns, and I had to go there for art supplies anyway.

In the end, I found this one restaurant in Shelby called Great Wall (Hey, it may not be original, but you know what it is.) It was an institution that outlasted Chinatown, but had a terrible buffet. In fact, if you're in the southeast of America and see a Great Wall, it's probably very small, has a terrible buffet, but has fantastic fried rice. I say that, because I found another one when I moved farther south and had a very similar feel, and almost identical menu, which leads me to believe it's a franchise, or just some kind of popular template.

I mentioned that Great Wall has great fried rice. I've seen all kinds of fried rice. Vegetable fried rice, pork, chicken -- all with different variations on the fillings. Carrots, peas, meat... but there was something I was digging about Great Wall's "plain" fried rice, and it was that it was... well, plain! It had two obvious ingredients - rice, and sweet onions. There was nothing special about the rice. It wasn't yellow like the rice I originally discovered. And, for some reason, it was the best rice I'd ever eaten. I'd often come there just for a large plain fried rice for 3 bucks. I was always greatly satisfied with delicious rice. He also learned my name, and I learned his. In retrospect, that should have been a hint that I was eating too much fried rice.

I didn't want to always have to go to town to buy fried rice, though. I wanted to make my own. So what do I do? I look for recipes online. The first recipe I tried suggested Basmati. A thin, very long-grain rice. I thought, is this the secret? But I failed to make good rice. I tried many things, and it just never tasted right. I even bought a big bag