Video: Steven Satterfield's Vegetable Fried Rice

Steven Satterfield is known as something of a vegetable whisperer: At his Atlanta, Georgia, restaurant, Miller Union, the James Beard Award finalist deftly weaves Southern influences into dishes like goat cheese and green onion tortellini with mushrooms and grilled Vidalias, and gulf red snapper with radish, carrot, fennel, green garlic and Meyer lemon. (It's worth noting that Miller Union is not a vegetarian restaurant by any means, with plenty of sustainable meat and seafood on the menu.)

His passion for cooking with the entire vegetable is something he explored in his gorgeous cookbook and ode to cooking seasonally, Root to Leaf, which came out last year. In its review, the New York Times says of the book "An exhaustive and fascinating guide to the four seasons of vegetable life in the American South, it offers both philosophy and instruction, with recipes that reward, again and again, minimal treatment of the very best ingredients." We call it how we should all be cooking every night, with his sure-handed guidance.

Satterfield recently came by Tasting Table's Test Kitchen to make one of his favorite veg-heavy family meals from Miller Union with our editorial director, Karen Palmer: an easy, delicious fried rice with scrambled eggs (see the recipe). It combines a few of the chef's favorite techniques: pickling to preserve vegetables' crispness and flavor long after they're out of season (pickled carrots add a punch to the dish), using the whole veg (broccoli florets and stems are used, as well as mustard greens and their stems) and building layers of flavor (the ingredients are quickly cooked in stages in a wok, then added back in to combine at the very end).

"It's a great way to use up kitchen scraps," Satterfield says. "You just need to start with cold rice, and then you can add whatever."

With its kick from soy, lime and Sriracha, his fried rice is a mix-and-match type of dish you'll want to make every night, no matter what you have on hand.