Want a quick weeknight meal? This flavourful shrimp and chicken fried rice combined with aromatic onions makes for one of the easiest weeknight meals ever. The added peas and carrots make it a more nutritious meal too.

Shrimp and chicken fried rice with peas and carrots

After a long day of work and a long commute, you don’t really have much energy left to make a delicious dinner. However, you don’t really want to eat out too much either since food costs keep going up every year and you want to be somewhat healthy. I’ll share with you one of my all-time favourite dishes that you can easily make after work – fried rice.

Fried rice is an easy-to-make dish that can be made with what you have at home and is pretty healthy (as long as not too much oil is added during frying). Specifically, I’ll be showing a shrimp and chicken fried rice recipe, but feel free to change up the proteins in this dish to suit your dietary needs.

This recipe is inspired from my family’s restaurant’s special fried rice dish that was quite popular with the customers. It’s basically a variation of Yang Chow fried rice, which is fried rice with more than one type of protein.

Purchasing Ingredients

Shrimp – You can buy any type or size of shrimp for this recipe. In this recipe, I’ve used pacific white shrimp, which is actually the most commonly sold type of shrimp where I live (in Canada). Personally, I like the smaller shrimps for fried rice since the shrimp protein will be more evenly distributed throughout the rice than if you use larger shrimps.
Rice – For Chinese restaurant-quality fried rice, buy long grain rice, such as Thai jasmine rice. I don’t recommend using medium grain rice, sushi rice or calrose rice for fried rice, as it tends to be very sticky and clumps together more easily.
Oyster sauce – You can find this at any Asian supermarket, but I’ve been seeing this being sold at local supermarkets in the international food aisles. Oyster sauce packs a huge umami punch to fried rice and adds some saltiness and sweetness to it.
Shaoxing wine or rice wine – These are sold at Asian supermarkets. You can find sake at the liquor store, but it is more economical to buy the cooking rice wine at an Asian supermarket.

Ingredients for shrimp and chicken fried rice

Ingredient Substitutions

Chicken & shrimp: Any combination of protein ingredients that you like (e.g., pork, beef, tofu, etc.)
Green onion: Yellow or white onion
Peas & carrots: Other mixed vegetables could go well with fried rice too, whether frozen or fresh. I like using frozen vegetables for fried rice because they’re already washed and diced. Other frozen mixed vegetables such as bagged frozen mix of green bean, corn, peas and carrots can go well with fried rice.

How to Make Shrimp and Chicken Fried Rice in a Nutshell

Season the shrimp.
Velvet/ marinate the diced chicken breast.
Whisk eggs and then scramble them.
Boil frozen mixed vegetables.
Cook the shrimp and chicken.
Fry chopped onions in a large saucepan or wok.
Add rice, peas and carrots, chicken and shrimp and seasonings. Deglaze with shaoxing wine or rice wine.
Mix in sesame oil and green onions.

Steps to making shrimp and chicken fried rice

The Science Behind this Recipe

Velveting the Chicken Breast

We’ll be velveting the chicken breast by combining it with cornstarch. At the same time, we’ll be marinating it. The cornstarch is meant to act as a protective coating to decrease moisture loss of the chicken during cooking. This makes for juicy pieces of chicken in our fried rice.

Preparing the Rice

I like to wash my rice 3 times. I add water and swirl the water around with my hand and rub the grains as well in my hand. Then I drain the water and repeat for another two times. You’ll see the water become starchy. It’s important to wash out the excess starch in rice before boiling it, since it’ll end up being starchy and very mushy if you don’t. When I prepare Thai jasmine rice, I add 50% more water than rice.

Deglazing

Deglazing by adding wine to the fried rice will free any browned bits on the wok from cooking the protein earlier. The browned bits pack a tonne of flavour and will then be dispersed throughout the fried rice.