Cooking the Classic Stir Fried Tomato and Egg

Many Chinese kids learn to cook stir fried egg and tomato

A classic Chinese homestyle dish is stir fried egg and tomato and I'm getting the hang of making it. 

It's one of the first things Chinese kids learn how to cook, but I'm learning how to make it decades older!

Cooking the tomato first in the wok

Nevertheless, it's a dish young and old like -- the savoury-sweetness from the tomatoes combined with the silkiness of the eggs make it kind of saucy so it must be eaten with rice or noodles.  It's a bright colourful dish, and for the elderly it's easy to eat and has a good amount of protein.

A few days ago I walked by a neighbour's house where they have a cardboard box out and put extra veggies in there and this time there were some tomatoes! I picked two and brought them home where they ripened a bit more.

Tonight we made stir fried egg and tomato, first by heating up some water in a pot and then scoring the bottom of the tomato and removing the core. When the water was boiling, we put the tomatoes in for about a minute or two before taking them out, running them under cold water and peeling the skin.

We then sliced up the tomatoes and heated up the wok. We added oil and when it was hot, put the sliced tomatoes in and then chopped them up a bit more with the wok spatula and added a dash of maple syrup (or sugar). 

Picked up some juicy tomatoes!

In the meantime we cracked four eggs and mixed them together, adding a pinch of salt to the mixture. Then we added the eggs to the wok, and used the spatula to stir the mixture periodically to let the eggs cook a bit until it was incorporated with the tomato, but still a bit runny thanks to the tomato liquid.

The end result was fantastic, as the homegrown tomatoes were sweeter than the ones you usually find in the supermarket, and I had a better handle on cooking the eggs.

Delish!