Riz perdu

There’s this whole thing we humans have about not wanting to let perfectly good food go to waste.  Take, for example, “Pain perdu” (meaning lost bread, or, as we like to call it, French toast).  Say you have a piece left of this lovely baguette that was perfectly good a day or so ago, but is now solide comme le roc.  You might have trouble throwing away this lump that took some poor struggling boulanger three days to make.  

And so faced with your day-old-pain, you have a few options.  You might take it to a lake and throw it in the water and watch it splash.  You might keep it around for self-defense (these things work well for fending off would-be thieves, I’ve heard).  Or you might slice it up (with a chainsaw, if it’s too hard to cut with a knife), dip it in egg, fry it, and eat it.  Seeing as I do not live near a lake, and I am a big scaredy-cat (all flight, and no fight, I fear), I personally would choose option 3.  

Now, say you were not French, but rather, you had grown up in, oh, say, Laos, and weren’t in the habit of buying baguettes from your local post-colonial boulangerie.  Your daily bread is the ever popular sticky rice.  And say you decide that you’d really like to warm up yesterday’s leftovers and enjoy them for breakfast.  You might, instead of chucking the lump of slightly hard sticky rice into the Mekong, form it into little patties, dip it in egg, and fry it up.  Plus, you might add a bit of salt or soy sauce to the beaten egg to add a bit more flavor.  No waste, and plenty of taste.  It’s a classic comfort food and a kid favorite. Let’s call it, “riz perdu.”