Eggy Home-style Meal

white rice with ulam of torta and egg & tomato

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Sometimes, all I really want is a couple of sunny-side-up eggs, fried until the edges are crispy with yolks still oozing, with plain rice. I would ladle over a spoonful of sinamak (chile vinegar condiment) on the eggs and I would be a happy camper.

Sometimes, the eggs deserve a little bit more jazzing up. Yet, no matter how much more sophisticated we want our eggs to be, we always end up with very home-style, very comforting egg dishes.

Case in point: we were running low on meat and vegetable options in the fridge the other day but we did have a surfeit of eggs. When that happens, we always have a very eggy meal.

We used up the last pound of Mama's ground pork haul this week to make Yaya's Golden Egg Torta (see right). It's been quite a long time since we've had this dish that I've forgotten how good it was.

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And while we were in an eggy state of mind, I thought to try making home-style Stir-fried Egg and Tomato for the first time, having been inspired by the recipe in the current issue of Gourmet (May 2009).

I learned a long time ago that this was a home-cooked dish common in Cantonese households, but I've never actually tried it (eating or cooking).

As you can see in the first photo, we decided to go home-style all the way. No fancy food styling (not that anything we do counts as "fancy food styling"), no fancy plates or cutlery, no nothing.

This is how we eat too, as mentioned before, with white rice as the "base" and ulam to accompany the rice. (In this case, the ulam being the Golden Egg Torta and the Stir-fried Egg and Tomato.)

What we have here is the plate we use on a daily basis, and the spoon and fork we use daily. These are lightweight Corelle plates, and lightweight stainless steel cutlery that we brought over from the Philippines.

We always wonder how people can use those heavy plates on a daily basis!

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When we moved to this new house in October last year, my father wanted to throw away these spoons and forks! He argued that since we have some new sets of cutlery, we should be using those instead. He also argued that these were "too old."

But this set -- this old set that we've had since children, since the first house we've ever lived in (our grandfather's house) -- is perfect!



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The spoon and fork are the right size for each other, the weight and balance of each is just right! No need to get into weird movements or weird positions just to put food on the spoon or fork.

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The new sets of cutlery have weirdo sizing, with the forks extremely large-headed and the spoons small-headed. Very unbalanced. Obviously they are not meant to be used together.

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I can remember when we had a meal at a Malaysian restaurant in town and they had these "designer" spoons and forks that were just a pain to use. Being a Malaysian restaurant, we expected them to understand about the spoon-and-fork situation. It's a Southeast Asian thing, after all. Their set was too heavy, and for some reason, the weight was concentrated in the middle of the piece! Weird. That set of cutlery quite ruined the experience for me and we actually never went back to this restaurant.

We now only have a few pieces of forks and spoons from our perfect set.

Sigh.

Eggy Meal ulam:
Yaya's Golden Egg Torta
Stir-fried Egg and Tomato

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