Cooking with Spam!

Okay, I have to be honest about something: I don't think I really ate Spam before I moved to Maui. Which is a little ironic, considering Spam is made in Minnesota & I grew up right next door in Wisconsin. You'd think I'd have at least tried it once. Nope! Instead, it took moving thousands of miles away to actually fall in love with it.

And I really have fallen in love with it — there are so many good ways to cook with Spam once you stop thinking of it as a joke ingredient and start treating it like the salty, crispy, versatile thing it actually is. My PERSONAL favorite is our take on Hawaii-style fried rice, and it's become a regular in our house.

Our HI Fried Rice

Ingredients: 1 can SPAM (use 1/2), 1 package bacon (use 1/2), ½ diced onion, 3 cloves garlic, 1” ginger, 6 eggs, 3 cups of cooked rice, 4 Tbsp soy sauce, 1 sprig of green onion.

Here's how we make it:

Start by frying up half a package of diced bacon. Once it's cooked, remove it from the pan but leave a little of the bacon grease behind — that's doing a lot of the flavor work here. Dice up half a can of Spam and fry it in that bacon grease until it gets nice and crispy, then set it aside with the bacon.

In the same pan, sauté half a chopped onion and three cloves of minced garlic for a few minutes, then stir in about a tablespoon of minced ginger. While that's cooking, whisk six eggs in a small bowl. Push the veggies to one side of the pan, pour in the eggs, and scramble them on the empty side. Once they're cooked, mix everything together. Then add back in the bacon and Spam to pan. Mix until well incorporated.

Once it's all combined, add three cups of cooked rice and mix well. Finish with two to four tablespoons of soy sauce, depending on how salty you like it, and give it one more good stir. Scoop it into a bowl, top with sliced green onion, and scarf it!

Salty & Savory! It’s legit ‘broke da mouth’ every single time!