I told you I've been cooking a pretty crazy amount of Asian food lately. And by "lately", I mean mostly a one-week period starting about a week and a half ago.

The dish in the second picture led indirectly to the dish in the first picture. It's complicated. See, a couple of Fridays ago, I made a vegetable and tofu stir fry. It was good. I didn't take a picture of it, but it was good. And it included fresh noodles from the Asian grocery nearby.

Early in the process, though, I had a mental lapse, forgot I was doing noodles, and made a giant pot of brown rice in the rice cooker. And I also cooked the whole bag of noodles. So when I was done with the noodle stir fry, I had a ton of plain rice and noodles left over.

The noodles got used the next day. I decided to use the last of some pork shoulder to make a batch of char siu, but I was lazy and bought a jar of Lee Kum Kee Char Siu Sauce to use as the marinade, then followed my previously posted cooking technique of a moist roast and frequent basting.

And if you're ever daunted by my char siu recipe, go ahead and do the same, because Cathy, who didn't realize I'd used a jar of pre made sauce, said that it came out more like the traditional pork that way. It was redder and stickier, at the very least.

Anyway, I made a five-spice vinaigrette with some olive oil, sesame oil, five spice power, and rice vinegar, dressed the leftover cold noodles in it, then tossed it with chunks of the pork and some raw vegetables. Lovely on a hot day.

When I have lots of leftover rice, my immediate thought is fried rice. I love fried rice. This one I decided to give a bi of a Southeast Asian twist - marinating the tofu in Sriracha, soy, fish sauce, rice vinegar, and Thai seasoning. I then made a secondary sauce out of soy, rice vinegar, jalapeño, fresh ginger, and fresh basil.

In addition, I prepped a mix of farm and grocery vegetables - kohlrabi, asparagus, bell pepper, a shit-ton of garlic scapes, etc. in a small dice. Got the wok nice and hot, started with the tofu, then the vegetables, then the rice. As the rice went in, so did the secondary sauce, along with some scallion greens and fresh basil. There were, I say with a certain amount of pride, no leftovers.

Of course, that wasn't all the rice. Nor was it all the pork. Nor was it all the garlic scapes. I think you know what that turned into this weekend. A little char siu fried rice for weekend lunch and weekday leftover lunches. Oh yes.