Scrambled eggs, take the umpteenth

[afuna]

I am back to cooking! Not sure how long this will last. I stopped cooking for a while because of work stress leading to lack of time, but work seems better these days so I may have more time to play! Last time I cooked, I ended up with bland fried rice. I meant to post about it, but got distracted, oops. I'm still not sure what I should have done -- added salt, maybe?

Anyway, on today's menu: sleeplessness at 6 am on a Saturday morning, hunger, scrambled eggs.

Woke up way too early, and too hungry to fall asleep again, so I decided to cook myself some light breakfast. Cereal didn't appeal to me; wanted protein of some sort. Easiest thing on the menu, eggs :D Doh :D




I wanted green leafy vegetables, so I picked that out first. It's market day, so we don't have many veggies. Those would be the shadowy newspaper-wrapped bundles in here:



Most of the bundles contained non-leafy vegetables, like peppers and cucumbers and ampalaya (bitter gourd?). But I finally found something suitably leafy, though not green, in a bundle marked "karrots" (oh Taglish, I love you so).

Quick snapshot of a first pass at gathering ingredients:



It was... lacking something though. So I took a quick channel poll: did I need garlic or onion? And responses were, "neither", 'onion", 'both"! I also seem to have sparked some conversation about how onions should be eaten, hah. Onion had the most votes, and fit my mood, so onion it was:



Some preprocessing, and I end up with these:



At some point, I swapped out the cheese for milk, because I wasn't sure if the cheese would go with the onion. Also, while beating the eggs, I wandered back to my laptop and saw Kat advising me to caramelize the onions before doing anything with them. So I ask!

Reproduced here, because it contains good advice -- and pictures!
Kat: Fu: It's up to you. I prefer onions carmelized because it makes them sweeter and less gag-inducing
* Afuna looks up caramelizing onions :)
Kat: I also think that the flavors in the carmelized onions are more complex than raw onion
Kat: Oh, I can tell you how!
Kat: I even have pictures!
Kat: In a frying pan (somewhere, you have a frying pan), melt some butter
Kat: slice up the onions (I do them in strips, but whatever you want to do is fine)
Kat: Add the onions and cook on low heat.
Kat: They'll start to turn brown and smell sweet
Kat: when they look done to you, take 'em off and continue as you were.
Afuna: hmmm any idea how long that'd take?
Azz: Not really long.
Azz: They stop smelling of pain and start smelling of delicious.
Kat: http://www.flickr.com/photos/llama_go_moooo/3579746166/in/set-72157616722647906/
Kat: Like that color brown, except more of it.
Kat: Umm.... 20 minutes?
Afuna: aw man I think I'm too hungry to wait for that. but I will do it the next time I cook something (which hopefully won't be long!)
Kat: It's totally worth it though
Kat: even if you can't wait that long, I'd at least try to get a little color on them.
Kat: Trust me.

Also another picture showing how the onions should look when you put them in.

Mine look slightly different, with purple stuff around the sides. I'm not sure what that means.

So I add an additional step, I caramelize the onions. Not sure how much butter I should use. Is this enough?



(In hindsight, I think I got a bit too much).


Here is how the onions looked when they started smelling of delicious, and I couldn't bear waiting any longer:



Here everything is dumped together in the frying pan! That is from the bowl where I beat the egg, then dumped the caramelized onion, then the vegetables, and since there was so much vegetable, I couldn't see the egg under it any more, I poured in some milk until I could see liquid around the veggies.



And finally, finished product!




I think I forgot the salt again, or maybe I was depending on the cheese for salt, and when I switched I forgot to account for it. Hmm.

Also, one thing I'm slowly learning is that I need to have everything prepared beforehand, instead of rushing about for forks/plates/ingredients while one set is cooking. It may make sense to multitask while something is cooking on the stove, but since most of what I'm doing right now is only on the stove a very short time, it makes lots more sense to just have everything ready to be dumped in.

Anyway, that's it for today. Basically have reinforced the lessons that:

• egg is good
  
• egg with ingredients is good
  
• perhaps I need to learn to use salt
  
• preparing stuff beforehand would save me a lot of rushing around!
  
• turn off the gas stove. Don't forget to turn it on, too.
  

Comments

[azurelunatic]

The purple onions just mean that your onion was a purple/red one instead of a white or yellow one. Onions come in different types.

The unspecified leafy vegetable looks like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napa_cabbage

[afuna]

Aha, thank you. Do the different types taste different, or more or less the same? *curious* Like, are the white onions generally stronger than red/purple?

And that looks like it, exactly! Now I have a(n English) name for them, thank you :)

[exor674]

o.O that cabbage is called 'karrots' O.o -- that makes me think of carrots which is... totally not leafy and nowhere close to that color :D

[afuna]

Nah, the person who bundled them up just mislabelled.

[exor674]

Haha, okay that makes more sense... I was just o.Oing if it was actually was called that....

(just for my own insanity, what would those things be called there?)

[poulpette]

Purple onions are generally sweeter than white onions, and are really great diced in salads.

Your scrambled eggs look delicious :D I think I know what I'll be having for breakfast now :D
I shudder a bit at the beating of the eggs before hand though. I've learned to scramble eggs directly in the pan (but then again, I don't use milk or cream in mine so I don't exactly do them by the rules either)

[jan]

Oh, sweet Jesus. I haven't been back sa atin since I was a teenager (that was, like, almost 20 years ago) but when I saw that picture with the Magnolia Quickmelt and Gina Salt, I felt a twinge of homesickness so acute... Also, ampalaya = FTW! Thank you for this post of awesomeness. &hearts

[yvi]

Heh, I had scrambled eggs for dinner yesterday myself - so only a few hours before you :) But with red pepper and mushrooms and parsley and basil :)

Looks very yummy!

[yati]

I didn't know there was such a thing as caramelized onion! I wonder if doing that using oil counts as "caramelized". I will have to try that with butter next time I make scrambled eggs.

Sometimes I throw in a dash of black pepper along with salt in the mix. (Sometimes I'm like you and totally forget the salt, and end up eating my eggs with a lot of tomato ketchup.)

[afuna]

♥

I'm glad to be of service.

(Also, hi! And sorry to be so late!)

[afuna]

I think so, maybe. The instructions I found via Google, before Kat walked me through it in IRC used oil, anyway. (Oh oh tomato ketchup. I love that with plain scrambled eggs! )

[afuna]

Cabbage is cabbage, carrots are carrots!

[marcelle42.livejournal.com]

If you want to be all fancy, "getting everything ready beforehand" is called mise en place, and I highly recommend it -- makes cooking MUCH easier, even if it does take a little time up front.

[ladyvox.livejournal.com]

Okay now I am hungry! :)

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

With something like scrambled eggs you're likely better adding salt at the table if you need it, though seasoning the eggs before you scramble them is usually the best way, doesn't work as well trying to add salt/pepper while they're cooking.

[iruka11.livejournal.com]

oooh good job :)

i like my eggs with cheese and some garlic chips ;) oooh onion would be great too... i should try that out next time

[anchan218.livejournal.com]

I like to add soy sauce to my fried rice instead of salt, but keep in mind since I'm American my fried rice isn't too authentic. ^^ I also tend to taste the fried rice a lot as it cooks 'cause it always feels like I'm dumping in a huge amount of soy sauce and I'm afraid of overdoing it. @_@

The purply onions just mean it's a different type of onion. I've been told that at least the purply onions around here are supposed to be kinda sweet (i.e. not so bad to eat raw). But I find I still want purply onions cooked 'cause they have too much of a bite, lol.

[habeo.livejournal.com]

Your eggs came out well!

Add milk and water to the eggs (so you have more "eggspace" to put more ingredients, and you can extend the limited egg mixture). Or, add more eggs! YUM!

I love adding tomatoes to the mix, to give it a bit of color and flavor. But cheese, have yet to try that.

And with the onions thing, I second anchan218. The "white" onions you see in the pictures are the huge ones. One would say that the smaller purplish ones have a different, stronger, flavor, but the white onions are juicier and bigger.