I’ve decided to forgo grocery shopping for a month. I want to see if I can cook/eat what I currently have in the refrigerator and pantry. This is scary business, because there’s a hodge podge of random ingredients and products that I have. Since I’m Asian and have an endless supply of rice, I can survive on that. Just add a little soy sauce for flavor. However, the goal is to see if I can create interesting dishes with the ingredients that I have on hand, not pretend that I’m locked away in an Asian prison.
I really don’t know if I’ll be able to do this, but I should at least give it a shot. I should have started this after buying groceries instead of starting this when I NEED to buy groceries. I’m out of a lot of stuff. Especially items that I like to bring for lunch every day. I guess I can bring ramen noodles for lunch, but it’s not very filling.
Anyway, this is what I made tonight. I don’t know what it’s called so I’m calling it Stuffed Egg Foo Young. Now I’ve posted a recipe for Egg Foo Young before so if you want to make that you can click here for the recipe. My mom makes this dish. However, hers is much prettier. She also uses complete and correct ingredients. But isn’t this the point of me doing this? Seeing if I make something edible out of the ingredients that I have on hand.
So, like I said, this is basically egg foo young with a sweet and savory ground beef filling. The egg is suppose to be wrapped around the filling like a pouch, but I didn’t use a big enough pan when I fried it up so the circumference is small.
This recipe yields 1 serving (unless you don’t eat much and then it yields 2 servings)
Ingredients that I had on hand:
2 eggs (beaten)
1 frozen hamburger patty that I smushed up into “ground beef”
4 to 6 grape tomatoes (cut each in half)
1 quarter cup of chopped onions
1 clove of chopped garlic
2 tablespoons of soy sauce
1/2 tablespoon of sugar or use per your taste
In a small pan, heat tablespoon of olive oil or cooking oil. Add garlic and cook until light brown. Add ground beef and cook until almost brown. Then add onions and tomatoes. Let it cook down. I had a lot of grease from my hamburger meat, so I removed most of it before adding the soy sauce and sugar. Have you ever had oyster sauce before? It’s kind of sweet and salty. Well, this is why we’re adding sugar and soy sauce to the beef. Sweet and salty. Once the beef mixture is cooked, remove it from the pan.
In a larger pan, cover the entire surface with cooking oil. You don’t have to use a lot of oil. Just make sure the whole pan is covered with it. Heat it on medium high to high. When your oil is hot, add the eggs to the pan. The eggs will puff up. You’ll want to flip it when the edges are a golden brown. You can always lift up the side and check to see if the underside is cooked. Once your egg foo young is ready (this cooks pretty quickly), put your eggs on a plate and then spoon the beef mixture onto the center.
I ate this with rice. It was pretty good. I didn’t get as much “sauce” from the beef mixture as I would have liked, but all in all it wasn’t bad.
