103. A special egg recipe: cooking egg with beef soup

Chinese egg and beef soup

Happy new year!!!


O, I am so sorry for not posting often recently, it seems I have been enjoying too much the paellas that my mother-in-law makes, and in my head it is all about the delicious Spanish food right now, I totally forgot about cooking Chinese. But if you have ever tried my suegra’s food, I am sure you will forgive me. :))) Ha… My mother-in-law said this is a perfect time for me to rest my mind, no need to think what to cook next, and what to buy… So I have been just eating and sleeping… and sunbathing in the sunny Spain. :))

Ok, coming back to cooking Chinese food -- with new year festival’s spirit. This dish is an egg recipe, in Chinese it is called ‘Shao jidan’. Shao is a method of cooking, like ‘Shao’ beef, --- slowly cooking, and ‘jidan’ means eggs. But this dish is quite special, as it is one of the landmark dishes of my ethnic group -- Hui. Talking about this dish, I guess I have to start with cooking beef first. :)


In China, meat dishes are indispensable for celebrating festivals, especially in my ethnic group. We make lots of beef dishes. Normally, when it comes to big festivals, family gatherings or memorial services, my uncles (temporarily act as professional chefs) would be busy in the kitchen cooking, and one of the first things they would do is to ‘prepare’ beef. As I mentioned in previous posts, the traditional food for Hui people is not stir-frying, but kind of ‘stewing’ and making ‘soup..ish’. So beef is normally prepared first, then it can be used in different dishes with different ingredients. To prepare it is to get the suitable pieces, chop them, then boil them with seasonings for hours.

After boiling, the beef can be cooked in different ways;  the ‘soup’ that is left in the sauce pan is usually not thrown away (it would be a waste), and it is normally used as ‘cooking stock’, or it is mixed with eggs to make this tasty egg dish, which is my favorite. The texture of this egg dish is very soft, a bit like steamed eggs, but with a touch of meat. It is different to normally steamed eggs with extra seasonings, because they can only be put on surface of steamed eggs, while this recipe makes the taste completely mixed within the egg.

It is fairly easy to make, especially if you have prepared some of my previous beef recipes, for example, article beef slice -- Pa rou tiao. But, as you probably have already guess, the taste of beef soup is very important for the taste of the eggs later. Where the ‘soup’ is ready, you only need to cook it with eggs.

Here it goes.

Ingredients:

For the boiling the beef: sichuan peppercorn, cinnamon sticks, anise stars, bay leaves, salt, light soy sauce

For making the eggs: oil, eggs.

Preparation:

If you haven’t prepared beef already, to boil the beef is put beef in the water with handful sichuan peppercorn, a few anise star, couple of cinnamon sticks and bay leaves, salt and couple of tablespoons of light soy sauce, and boil the beef in low fire for around 1 1/2 -- 2 hours.

Whisk around 5 eggs in a bowl.

Cooking:

1) Mix the (warm) beef soup with eggs, the proportion normally is a bit more than 1/3 of soup and 2/3 of eggs, whisk them well.

2) In a heated wok, add in around 2 tablespoons of oil, allow oil evenly spread in the wok, then pour the egg mix in. Keep the fire low.

3) Slowly cook the egg until the surface is ‘dry’, not in liquid form anymore. If there are too much ‘liquid’ eggs on the surface, you can carefully move the edge a little bit, allow the ‘liquid’ eggs flow down. ---

------ Then it is done!!!

Oh, I only wish I could explain to you how delicious it is -- my mouth is watering.
It is perfect to go with boiled plain rice and beer. :))

Hope you like it!! And happy 2012!!