She did that…

My late aunt, the eldest of the siblings and the matriarch in the family after my maternal grandma passed away, used to cook steamed minced pork with soy sauce and she would always add an egg on top. I remember I enjoyed that a lot but I never asked how she did that and how I could go about doing the same.

My missus would cook the same at home a little differently, following her own family recipe. If I am not wrong, she would add chopped Bombay onion and thinly sliced shitake mushrooms…and what we call tang chai aka tianjin preserved vegetables (which I can’t say I am all that fond of) and the dish would taste exactly the same everytime unlike me and my half-baked efforts at cooking anything.

Anyway, we had some leftover plain porridge the other morning from the night before so I decided to steam a bit of minced pork with cincaluk – the same way that I cooked the chicken the other day with those fermented shrimps and tuak, our traditional ethnic rice wine. Of course, I had run out of the wine so I decided to do without it.

Firstly, I mixed the minced meat with some cincaluk, a few slices of ginger, one stick of serai, cut into two and bruised…and some daun kesum (laksa leaves)…

Oopsss!!! I forgot all about the chili, but never mind – we can dab our own pounded chili later if we would like it hot.

After that, I broke an egg into the bowl…

…and mixed it well with everything in it. This was to bind everything together in the process of steaming. I steamed that for around 15-20 minutes and then I took it out to add the egg on top. Once I had done that, I put it back into the steamer to continue with the steaming till the egg was cooked…

Hmmm….I do not recall what my late aunt’s used to look like – I can only remember how I enjoyed eating it. For one thing, since she used dark soy sauce, there was a lot more contrast and hers did not look so pale. I should have added a bit of chili and/or sprinkled some chopped spring onion for that badly-needed colour.

The egg looked like it was overdone but when I checked, I found that it was all right, the yolk was still runny…

…inside.

It tasted great but I missed the tuak – with the wine, the chicken had an edge over this dish…

…so the next time I cook this, perhaps I should try adding some traditional white cooking wine – the one we use for cooking kacang ma chicken. I am pretty sure it would be nicer.

Anyway, since I still had some minced meat left, yesterday, I decided to cook this dish the way my late aunt did it – no onion, no tang chai, no wine. I just marinated the meat with soy sauce, a bit of sugar and pepper and cornflour. Don’t ask me about the cornflour – I went and browsed through some recipes and saw that they added that, that or tapioca flour. I also read that they mixed the white of the egg with the meat and left the yolk to be placed on top like this…

I should have done it my own way – add one whole egg and mix with the meat and break another egg on top…and I could not resist adding lots of chopped spring onions seeing that I’ve a lot growing out of a pot outside.

It tasted really great though – I sure would want to try again and I’ll make sure that I get it right next time.