Over the winter, I bought myself a copy of Kylie Kwong's Simple Chinese Cooking with an Amazon gift certificate my good friend Jodi gave me. And I am just now getting around to trying out a recipe!
I might venture into one of those food blogging trends a la Julie & Julia, where I cook my way through a cookbook & blog about it. I think this Kwong cookbook is a good place to start. We'll see how it goes.
Anyway, with my weird appetite issues, which persist, unfortunately, I for some reason remembered this recipe and it really appealed to me at the time. It looked simple enough and the flavour combination intrigued me. I made half a recipe to start out with in case I didn't like them.
The recipe is here.
Here is a look at my process, from the beginning. My hard boiled eggs went into the soy sauce mixture, after mixture camed to a boil.
The cartouche part didn't really work for me, and I didn't see the point of it. When I placed it on the eggs, it kept the steam in and would bubble to the top. It got annoying to keep letting the steam out so the cartouche wouldn't fly away on me, so I tried the lid of the pot. It boiled over. So, I simmered without any covering, just making sure to keep the eggs basted in the liquid. This worked fine.
This recipe takes a long time - an hour of braising. Here are the eggs half-way through.
And here they are at the end, by which time the soy sauce mixture had reduced to a thick syurp. BTW, I didn't use the fresh ginger, I used 2 tsp of ground.
They don't look terribly appetizing at this point...
And here they are plated...I couldn't resist the googly-eyed face...
These taste delicious, but the drawback is that it's a lot of work for not a lot of end product. The outer part of the egg was a little rubbery, but not off-puttingly so. I might make a larger batch for a special occasion.
I wonder what I'll do next?
