Tamago Sando/Japanese Egg Sandwich

This post is a love note to the oh so addictive egg sandwich that we discovered in the fab Japanese convenience store Lawson and fell in love with instantly and completely!  The phonetic Japanese name of 'Tamago Sando' translates to 'egg sandwich.'  I know, I know, there have been egg sandwiches around for ages and ages, what's the big to-do for one more egg sandwich?  Well, after our last visit to Tokyo, we so longed for our daily Lawson's egg sandwich that I finally put my foot down, no more dreaming ladies and gents, let's make our own!

And it was, wonderfully, so easy to make and so happy to eat!  With a creamy and ever so comforting eggy filling spread onto soft and pillowy milk bread, this humble Tamago Sando Japanese Egg Sandwich is to die for!

Chinese Iron Eggs 鐵蛋

These unusual looking treats, called Iron Eggs 鐵蛋, are an interesting snack that originates from Taiwan.  One can sometimes find them in convenience stores in HK; that's where we first discovered them, these tiny dark brown almost black eggs vacuum packed into see through packages.  Liking to try weird foods (almost black eggs!) we bought a pack and in the first delectable tiny bite became instant iron fans.

The legendary Iron Egg started at a Taiwan food stall that sold normal soy sauce eggs.  One day due to bad weather there was a serious lack of customers.  So the soy cooked eggs were thrown back into the pot and recooked again, still no customers, recooked again, still no customers, and so on.  Eventually the eggs shrank and became dark and dense.  However they tasted really, really good!  So good that customers began to request them and thus began the legend of the iron egg.  (Don’t you just love that name!  And the iron only refers to the color and not the texture BTW.)

This is an exceptionally tasty treat that goes great as a party snack or drinking snack or just a whatever snack.  The making is simple but it takes quite a bit of time.  The final result, these Chinese Iron Eggs 鐵蛋, are tiny eggs with a chewy outer shell and a lush yolk, all throughly infused with the aromatics that it has been cooked in repeatedly.  A burst of intense spiced eggy goodness in a perfect little package, Iron Eggs are just the most delicious little snack!

Lotus Seed Egg Tea 蓮子蛋茶

To bring in the new year we present our next delectable Chinese dessert soup.  This subtly delicious and comforting sweet soup will warm your heart and tummy in the depths of any wintery chill. Requiring only a few ingredients, this Lotus Seed Egg Tea (not sure why it’s called a ‘tea’ and not a soup?) 蓮子蛋茶 is deceptively simple to make.  

The result is a beautifully golden hued soup with a clear sweet delicate taste, bejeweled with melt in your mouth lotus seeds and sweet soft red jujubes.  Oh,  and there is the added delight of a hard boiled egg!  The egg is my favorite part, the slippery egg white and the melty egg yolk just tastes so good slurped in with the soup!  It's the perfect afternoon snack for a wintery day, both fortifying and comforting.

Add-on Note: I just found out that this tea is served to newlyweds to symbolize the hopes that they will soon conceive children.  The rather obvious symbols being the 'seed' and the 'egg'--he he!  

Grandma's Spring Onion Egg Pancakes 蔥油蛋餅

Dearest readers, I've been feeling really homesick for some of my beloved grandma's 奶奶 wonderful cooking and was ever so pleased when I discovered this recipe in one of my favorite Chinese cookbooks, The Key to Chinese Cooking by Irene Kuo, an absolute treasure trove of authentic Chinese recipes first published in 1977.  

I was casually flipping through this book the other day and reading here and there and suddenly I realized that this was it! This was the recipe for my grandma's delicious after school pancakes!!  I had never quite been able to recreate it and couldn't find a recipe through research, probably because it's such a humble homey kind of food that no one ever thought to put it in a book.  Well, no one except the talented and very smart Ms. Kuo, that is.  

Let me just say, y'all in for a treat!  My grandma's humble little Chinese Spring Onion Egg Pancakes, 蔥油蛋餅, are super duper yummilicious!

Chinese Egg Fried Rice 蛋炒飯 - A Different Method

Here's a different and tasty way to make that old favorite, Chinese Egg Fried Rice!  This alternative method my hubby 老公 discovered makes for a gorgeously yellow hued and creamy version of fried rice.  It's super yummy and just as easy to make.  I haven't decided yet which version I prefer, the traditional way of making Chinese Fried Rice or this new creamier version of fried rice.  

Chinese Preserved Radish Omelette 菜脯煎蛋

This humble Chinese comfort egg dish (EGG PIE!) is a cheat.  Actually all Chinese egg dishes are cheats: simple ingredients that are usually on hand anyways, easy peasy and fast to make and most importantly super duper yummy to eat!  

For a Chinese style dinner where there are always at least 3 dishes served, an egg dish is a most excellent and efficient choice to include on the menu for a cozy family dinner.

And thus, ta-da!  Our latest easy egg dish the Chinese Preserved Radish Omelette 菜脯煎蛋 is a traditional home cooking favorite, so good and so easy to make this egg pie!

Chinese Custard Buns 奶黃包

A Chinese Custard Bun 奶黃包, white fluffy bread wrapped tenderly about a gorgeous center of creamy milk and egg custard...yummmilicious...!!  Sunshine in a bun, that's what it is.  You can't bite into one of these buns and not get a smile on your face.  

This delectable treat is usually only to be enjoyed when one can spare a leisurely afternoon to enjoy Cantonese Dim Sum but no longer!  Now you won't have to wait for the dim sum cart to roll around, you can enjoy it anytime you want at home with our easy to make Chinese Custard Bun recipe!

Pan Fried Cheung Fun (Rice Rolls) with Egg 香煎腸粉炒蛋

Recently we were really excited when a new little food shop opened on our street and we saw that they sold all kinds of chinese noodles (like Cantonese egg noodles), and most exciting of all, at least for me, was that they sold really fresh Cheung Fun 腸粉, also known as Rice Rolls or Rice Noodle Rolls.  

Cheung Fun is used for all kinds of dishes, both savory and sweet, but for myself the favorite preparation is the classic Hong Kong snack food Pan Fried Cheung Fun with Egg.  Chewy fragrant rice, just fried egg clinging to the rolls, splashes of sweet soy sauce and oh, the tasty deliciousness of hoisin sauce!  YUMM...comfort food alert!!

Egg Tarts 蛋撻

Greetings for the New Year and hope that you all have had a great holiday season!   I know that we've been really, really busy and have only now had a chance to breath a bit.  

So, in thinking of what to write about as the first post of this grand new year, I had the inspiration to bring in the year with a bit of sunshine and to me there is not a thing in the world that is as sunshiny and cheerful as the absolutely fabulously famous and wonderfully traditional Chinese Egg Tart, or 蛋撻!  

It's something that every Chinese kid grew up with, it's sorta programmed into our DNA or something. Egg tarts are the first 'desserts' I remember eating, my grubby little hand eagerly lifting up a tart from its big pink box, falling in finger lickin love from the first moment with that tender, sweet eggy custard and the cookie like crust.  Ohh...just taking one luscious bite of an egg tart takes me right back to warm and fuzzy times...

Refrigerate Eggs or Not?

I'm sure I've written before about my grumpy old egg man at my local Hong Kong wet market and, lo and behold, here is that old sweetheart again, creeping grouchily into my story.  Well, what happened is that one day a while ago I forgot (again!) to keep my mouth shut when I was buying my eggs (he has the best eggs!) and I asked a stupid question (stupid to him, not to me.)  

As I was standing there waiting for my egg man to wrap up my fresh free range eggs in a neat cone of newspaper, it dawned on me that all his eggs were just sitting out in the open air.  In other words, they were not refrigerated!  

In the old days before I discovered him, I had always previously bought refrigerated eggs at the supermarket and kept my eggs in the refrigerator at home.  So I asked my grumpy old egg man why he did not need to refrigerate his eggs.  

Boy oh boy, did I get a long lecture that day about the general lack of food culture, lack of food knowledge, heck, even the overall degeneration of society, before he would hand over the eggs that I had already paid for.  But the thing is, lecture or no, he never did answer my question: Refrigerate Eggs or Not?  雪蛋環是不雪蛋?

Steamed Dungeness Crab and Egg White 蛋白清蒸珍寶蟹

A bit of silky egg white and a bit of luscious crab meat!

We love all kinds of crab in this household, especially Dungeness Crab.  It is one of the few crabs that preserves sweet succulent tenderness while also being quite meaty.  Unfortunately it is quite expensive in Hong Kong.  

Luckily for us, however, my 老公's mother recently arrived from Vancouver, bringing with her two beautiful Dungeness crabs, still alive and kicking!  Since we had two of these lovelies we decided to prepare them different ways to settle an old argument we've been having forever: is it better to boil or steam crab?

Tomato Egg Drop Soup 番茄蛋花湯

In our little family we sometimes argue about Chinese food.  Mostly due to the fact that our respective families come from different provinces ( I am from Jiangsu and he is from Guangdong) and that means that we were raised eating different kinds of Chinese food.  

What a lot of people don't realize is that the difference between provinces in China are similar to differences between nations in Europe.  The differences range from extreme (as in I cannot for the life of me understand your version of the Chinese oral language) to vaguely similar (as with Chinese food which all seem to be based on similar ingredients but vary wildly as to the final product).  

So it was with pleasant surprise recently that we came up with the same taste requirements for this wonderful classic Chinese comfort dish, Tomato Egg Drop Soup, or 番茄蛋花湯.  This is a really, really easy light soup that tastes way better than you think it could.  It goes wonderful with a chinese dinner and is dynamite for these hot summer days because it tastes just as good cold as hot.

Easter Egg Natural Dye

Here's something fun and natural for Easter.  My little girl and I had made Easter Eggs for the first time last year when she was almost 3 years old.  It was really fun and we did a post about our tiny Easter Eggs, but in my heart I was a bit horrified by the obnoxiously bright fakeness of the food coloring dyes that we used and that were eventually eaten into our systems along with the eggs.  (No, we didn't eat the shells but the coloring kinda soaks in quite a bit, doesn't it?)  

So I was really interested when, this year, as I was mentally preparing for Easter Egg making, to see a blog article on using natural dyes to make really beautiful natural Easter Eggs.  We tried it and as you can see the result is quite a looker and very very safe to eat for your little ones. It takes a bit more time and effort but we definitely thought the results were gorgeously worth it.

Chinese Egg Fried Rice 蛋炒飯

Chinese Egg fried rice, or 蛋炒飯, is the quintessential leftover dish.  You open your fridge and you've got leftover rice, leftover char sui, leftover choi sum, etc from yesterday's dinner.  What're you gonna do?  Make chinese egg fried rice of course.   

As long as you have the basics, i.e. rice, egg, spring onion, then you just chop up and throw in whatever else leftovers that you have and you will end up with a easy to make, lip-smacking and creative dish that you can serve instead of plain rice.  (Kids love this!  My dearest Grandma 奶奶 used to make this as an after-school snack everyday.)

Chinese Steamed Egg Custard 蒸蛋

Smooth, creamy, warming, comforting and quietly good tasting - that is a food to die for, is it not?  One of my personal favorites in this category of comfort foods is the Chinese Steamed Egg Custard or  蒸蛋, which most Chinese probably grew up eating at the family table.

But come the time for me to make it by myself in my own grown-up little kitchen, I discovered to my dismay that this deceptively humble little dish is much more elusive than its simple appearance warrants.  I made it again and again, but alas could not achieve the glass like smoothness that should have been. 

 Confused, I thought longingly back to my Grandma, seeing her in my mind's eye as she casually whipped this dish together: me, helping to stir the eggs, Grandma adding the water and salt by eye and then lowering the bowl into our old beat up rice cooker that still required water to be added around the cooking container.  And then, presto!, the perfect steamed egg custard time after time.  I didn't even know that there were other steamed egg textures possible!   But then, there you go, that's Grandma magic for you.  

Tomato Egg Stir Fry 蕃茄炒蛋

You know how there are some foods that, when you smell, see or taste them, take you straight back to when you were just a wee girlie or laddie and were just tall enough to sit in the 'real' chairs and eat with the big people?  Ah, life was good then!  I didn't have to do a thing back then, just sit in my wee chair and eat to my heart's content all the yummy food that Grandma cooked each day.  Oh dear, I'm getting a tear in my eye...  How I miss Grandma and her wonderful cooking!  

She's the real reason that I have all these strong food memories for real Chinese home-cooking.  Grandma cooked proper delicious Chinese meals everyday of the year.  One favorite dish of mine that she made a lot was Tomato Egg Stir Fry 蕃茄炒蛋, a homey dish that, when well done, is a perfect combination of tastes and textures as well as being simple and quick to make.

Nowadays, whenever I gobble down the first couple of bites of this delicious Chinese comfort dish, I swear I can almost hear my dearest Grandma pottering about the pots and pans in the kitchen.

Thousand Year Old Eggs and the Easter Bunny

When I was a little girl a favorite treat for me was eating thousand year old eggs or 皮蛋.  At our family dinners I would wait impatiently as my grandmother ate her share first (at Chinese dinners the elders always had the first pick).  She loved the shining smooth black and green eggs with the unique creamy/jellyish texture as much as I did.

But always, when my dearest grandma caught me greedily eyeing the diminishing pile of thousand year eggs she would quickly choose a nice piece with her chopsticks and gently place it in my rice bowl.  Yum, yum!  Thank you 奶奶!

Century Egg and Tofu 皮蛋豆腐

Century Egg and Tofu 皮蛋豆腐 is a classic Shanghainese dish that requires no cooking at all and is simple to make.  For us it is a kind of comfort food.  It relies on the made-in-heaven combination of two very Chinese ingredients: tofu 豆腐 and century egg 皮蛋.

There is the delicate silken texture as well as the rather bland taste of the tofu which lends well to absorbing introduced flavours.   To counter that there is the pleasing slipperyness and luscious gooeyness of the century egg with its strong distinctive flavors.  Rather like some kinds of good western cheese, there is at first a unique smell and texture and then the scrumptious flavor comes to you.  Once you are acquainted with its flavor and texture, century eggs become a special sensory taste treat.

Poached Egg - The Holy Grail of Eggdom

The debate on the methods for achieving the perfect poached egg were overwhelming the first time we decided to try making poached egg for ourselves.  We tried various methods that were vouched for including some rather exotic methods (such as cling film wrapped egg, which did not work but ended up giving us an endless laugh at the final strange looking product). In the end nothing really worked and we gave up for a time the search for the holy grail of eggdom.