Saturday, August 04, 2007

Eggs and Tomatoes

OK, here's a classic Chinese home cooking dish. Easy as heck! First, you scramble some eggs. The way I do it is to beat about 4 eggs (salt a bit first) very well. Dice some scallions and throw them in as well.

In a wok or a relatively big pan, heat up some oil until it's very hot (almost smoking). I'd say about a tablespoon for every 2 eggs, or 3 if you have a non-stick pan. Once the oil is very hot, dump in the beaten eggs quickly. Use a chopstick or other untensil to gently push around the mixture, exposing the un-set egg to hot oil as quickly as possible. After about 30 seconds, stir vigorously to break the egg s roughly into big chunks. Pepper to taste if you like.Then take some tomatoes (I use about 3-4 vine ripes on sale!) and cut into about 3/4" cubes. You're not making coulis or anything so don't make it too small. Size doesn't matter so much. Heat up some hot oil (a teaspoon) and dump the tomatoes in. Cook until juices are all out and have reduced by about a quarter to a third. A bit of sugar here works well too.
Dump the eggs back in and use a spatula to do double duty: cut up the egg into small chunks and fold the tomatoes and egg together. Keep the heat on high and cook for about 2 minutes.
Plate and serve. Easy stuff and you can feel free to vary the ratio of eggs to tomatoes, scallions to eggs, size of tomatoes, etc. The savory eggs (boosted a lot by the scallions) is a distinct counterpoint to the sweet/sour tomato. And just in case that's not enough calories:
Heat up some pound cake, plop on a whole bunch of chocolate ice cream, and cut up some strawberries. It's like the supermarket special of desserts. But sometimes, you just feel like something obvious, without finesse, and straight forward.

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