flailing in my kitchen v3.1
How can I be sad when I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner?
Hello! You probably noticed that my blog looks different! About a year ago, I asked my friend bogo if he could make some fan art for the blog. I didn't really give him any guidelines, except that I wanted eggs in it, and I think he did an amazing job!
I wanted to incorporate this art on the website, but it also felt like the whole site needed a facelift. Recently, I've grown to really dislike the color green. A few people know why, and if you don't, feel free to ask me about it. It's just the type of thing that I don't want to air on the public internet 😬 But the old design had lots of green, and I wanted something very not-green.
Speaking of eggs, one of my friends told me that if I have some heavy cream, that I could use it to fry eggs, and he told me to look up Kenji's video on fried eggs. Well, for some reason I had leftover heavy cream, and I decided it was time to fry up some eggs.
I don't really have much to say about this, but I love eggs, especially for breakfast, and I love it when I find a new way to cook them. This was no exception. I don't think I would ever go out of my way to make heavy cream eggs because they're well, heavy, but it's great when I need to use up extra cream.
I paired the eggs with a slice of seedy, Bistro Multigrain Bread from Aldi. I'm usually not a fan of bread with all the extra seeds and grains in it, but I really like this bread from Aldi! Sometimes I just toast it and drizzle some extra virgin olive oil and salt on it.
I keep telling myself I need to stop staring at my phone so much, so I've been trying to read during breakfast. This was from February and I was in the middle of reading The Three Body Problem. It was...alright. Tune in next time to see the book I'm currently reading!
As I was putting the final touches on my previous blog post, I went to go add an "eggs" tag and I realized...I didn't even have an eggs tag yet 😯 But I eat eggs all the time. I thought that I must have had many entries that feature eggs, but I really didn't. So I gotta add more!
My go-to breakfast is beung pue neung飯配卵 - rice with eggs. I never ever ever get sick of it, because who could ever get sick of eggs?! There are also so many ways to cook eggs that I'd still have lots of variety in my meals if I only ever had rice with eggs for breakfast.
My mom made fried eggs for me a lot when I was a kid. You just heat up a pan on high, add some oil, and then crack a couple of eggs. Well, my mom cooks it on high. I turn the dial to about a 7 or an 8 if I'm feeling risky. High heat will give you this really nice crispy edge, but I fear too much for my own safety. Do you know about the time I burned my leg in high school? That was from me trying to cook this very dish.
We always drizzle si iu豉油 - soy sauce on top, but not just any soy sauce, Golden Mountain Seasoning Sauce. It's actually not even labeled as soy sauce at all. I was so in shock when I learned this in college.
A much safer way to cook eggs is to scramble them because then you're supposed to use low heat. Of course that takes way too long, so I'm still cooking my scrambled eggs at a 7. I'm also really basic when it comes to scrambled eggs. All I mix into them is salt, and maybe pepper if I'm feeling spice-y.
I did get a little inspired by this Jimmy O Yang video, and now I always drizzle sesame oil on my scrambled eggs. I actually used to not be a fan of sesame oil, but something changed when I started pouring it over my eggs and now I'm putting it on all my Asian foods.
So I know I've shared photos of marinated boiled eggs in the past, and I'm usually putting them on some type of noodle soup, but I also really like to eat these with rice! (And some giam chai鹹菜 - pickled mustard greens if I have it)
I know there's a lot of different methods for hard/soft boiling eggs, but what works best for me is to:
I've used a few different recipes for the marinade in the past, but recently I've been making a lot of these Quick Marinated Eggs from Omnivore's Cookbook. It uses five spice, and I'm still trying to get rid of it. Honestly, I can't even tell that there's five spice in this. But whatever, it's delicious.
Frying, scrambling, and boiling eggs are all methods that I've been familiar with for years now, and I probably would feel content enough with just those, but any time I see a new way of cooking an egg I gotta try it. So when I saw Kenji's video on Tamago Gohan, I was like "I NEED TO TRY THIS." Plus all I had to do was mix. That's super easy.
Okay, I guess I'm not even really cooking the egg in this. But you don't have to convince me to eat a mostly raw egg. If some knowledgeable person on the internet tells me it's safe, then I'm eating it.
I'll be honest, while I did enjoy eating this, it's not my favorite. I think I like my eggs to stay mostly eggs rather than being so incorporated into the rice. I guess this makes sense, I don't even like omelettes because of the extra stuff in them.
So that was the easiest, quickest egg rice, and this last one is probably the most involved.
I started seeing shorts by Nutrition by Kylie on my youtube feed, and she had a video on steamed eggs, which she says is one of her favorite things to make. I made it, and it could be one of my favorite ways to eat eggs, but I gotta say, it's a little too involved to ever be one of my favorite things to make.
I tried making it again later, and I took some shortcuts, like using the microwave instead of properly steaming it.
Yeah, it was not nearly as pretty and did not have that silky smooth texture. Still tasted good, but it's definitely worth doing all the steps.
But there you have it! Five different ways of enjoying rice and eggs. Some of them I make more than others, but they're all part of my breakfast rotation. Do you have another tasty way to prepare eggs and rice? Please let me know about it!
Continuing on the egg train! 🪺 🥚 🍳
So my little sister visited me in May, and around that time we like to celebrate a little holiday we made up where we exchange gifts and tell each other "Happy not-a-Mother's day!" I gave her some Pokémon cards, and she gave me a few packs of my absolute favorite MAMA instant noodles with gue diao粿條 - rice noodles.
My dad would always keep these stocked in his apartment, and when I went off to college he sent me a huge box full of them to keep in my dorm room. They were my go-to noodles, and I would always eat them with an egg. As an adult, I don't eat instant noodles too often, but there was one time last year that I thought, I could really go for some Mama mi.
I know it's not actually mi麵 - egg noodles, I just find it rolls off the tongue to say Mama mi
Unfortunately, most Asian grocery stores do NOT stock these! I mean they're not impossible to find like ou nam烏欖 - Chinese black olives, but at least 9 out of 10 Asian stores aren't going to have them. I would know. I look for them every time I'm in an Asian store.
Sometimes I find a similar instant noodle with clear broth, but it has the thin noodles instead. It's the same flavor, so it tastes good, but man, it does not hit the same as the wide, flat noodles.
The noodles come with a seasoning packet, an oil packet, and a spicy packet. Now when I eat something like Buldak, I always use all of the spicy sauce, because I gotta have the full spice-inducing experience. With these Mama noodles, I don't use any of the spicy stuff. I'm not trying to struggle here.
I mostly follow the package instructions. I boil about 1.5 cups of water, and I throw the noodles in and stir them around until they're soft. You do want to give them a good stir because I find that it's very easy for rice noodles to stick to each other. Then I crack in my egg and do some more stirring, and finally I add the oil and seasoning and turn off the heat.
If I have a scallion in my fridge, I usually cut that up and throw it on top as well, because it gives me the illusion that I'm making this healthier and because it makes the dish look prettier. And then I eat this one spoonful at a time, making sure to put a noodle, some egg, some scallion, and some soup, all in each bite. So comforting and so good.
There are no eggs in this post, because I made something vegan. Like actually vegan, not vegetarian with a side of bacon, not vegan but I threw real cheese on top, 100% vegan. We were throwing a birthday party for one of the guys in the dance game community, and he's vegan so I had to make sure to not take any shortcuts here. I made some vegan "butter chicken", which contained no butter and no chicken.
In fact, I even omitted the cashews from this recipe just in case anyone had a nut allergy, and I put all the cilantro in a bowl on the side to not ruin the dish for the cilantro-tastes-like-soap people. Unfortunately I was too lazy to make vegan naan, and the grocery stores don't really sell that, but I did buy some of that seedy bread that I like from Aldi.
This ended up being a huge hit, and it was all gone shortly after I got to the party. And I barely got to eat any! So I decided that I wanted to make another batch. I also thought that one block of tofu was not nearly enough for the amount of sauce in this dish, so I doubled it for my second batch.
I love tofu, especially in curry. I used to follow curry recipes and replace tofu with chicken, now I'm replacing chicken with tofu!
A lot of the recipes I use will tell me to press the tofu to remove excess moisture, but I'm getting kind of tired of pressing it, and I decided to try something different here. I first cut up the tofu into cubes and I let that sit in a bowl of salted water for a while. When I'm ready to use them, I drain the water and pat the tofu dry a little. I'm certainly getting more flavorful tofu this way, and it seems to dry out the tofu just as well as pressing.
Okay, I didn't actually make this completely vegan for the second batch. It is really hard to find a single serving container of non-dairy yogurt. I bought coconut yogurt for my first batch, but I had to trek all the way to Whole Foods and spend over $2 for it. I just bought plain Chobani Greek yogurt for the second batch.
I may have had a little too much food for this second batch because I felt like I had to eat 10 meals of it just to get through it all. But it was very good! At this point I've made this dish a bunch of times, so it's basically one of my go-tos.
