Soup

Today I am going to do a traditional Chinese soup, this is more like an everyday dish for most of Chinese families. My mom taught me how to do it when I was 6 because she was to busy at work so I can feed myself while she was at work. For 14 years I have been doing this soup really frequently and now I am going to share my experience about how I cook my tomato egg soup.

First of all, we need certain amount of tomatoes and eggs. The amount of tomatoes is really depending on how many people you are serving, for the tomatoes like fist big, you always want one tomato more than the serving amount (2 tomatoes for one serving and 3 tomatoes for 2 serving like that.). As for eggs, it is depending how you like it. For me personally I keep the egg amount equal to the serving amount.

Keep in mind the tomato quality is dominating the dish quality so when you buy tomatoes, you and the firm and red tomatoes, not too soft or too hard, firm.

Cut the tomatoes as shown.

Get a Chinese pot on high heat, put in oil and wait till it starts smoking.  

Toss all the tomatoes in, cut the tomatoes into half if necessary.

Let it cook, until they are cook as shown, little amount of water if it goes too dry.

Add water slowly, keep the liquid in the pot averagely red, if some of it gets lighter, stop adding water.

Bring the water to boil, stir eggs with a fork and preserve aside.

Add salt to soup, for this soup the ultimate goal is to reach the max point of sweetness and sourness. So ass salt every little a time for several times. Taste it often. Because every tomato has different quality so be extra careful.

Pour eggs in to the soup, bring to boil again and serve immediately. 

For this soup, there is a point of maximum sweetness and sourness you can reach by adding salt to it, for different tomatoes you need different amount of salt. So the salt amount is really important to this soup. I had my friend tried some and he said "as good as usual." so i guess my soup was a success.Making this soup for such a long time improved my ability to deal with different tomatoes. So I well be easier to reach the limit of tomatoes of different dishes.

preserved garlic

For this recipe, we are going to need garlic, vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, salt, and a jar.

First of all, peel and wash garlic carefully.

Secondly, clean your jar carefully and be extra careful that don’t get ANY OF OIL into it.

Thirdly,dry the garlic put the garlic into the jar, shake the jar several times during this procedure to get garlic close to each other.

After that, get a clean bowl, mix all the ingredients and put them in to the jar, make sure you got enough to cover all the garlic in the jar. (Make sure that bowl is clean, if there are any oil left, you ruined the whole thing.)

Usually you can leave the jar for a month then you can eat it, it has nice sweet and sour in it. If you also want some original garlic spicy flavor, two weeks is enough for you.

Because this is a family recipe so my mom do not really know and exact amount of ingredients. Basically you need one teaspoon of salt, two teaspoon of soy sauce, big amount of vinegar and sugar. When you are making the mixture, make sure you put in salt and soy sauce first, then you add big amount of vinegar to cover all the garlic, then add sugar at last to sweeten the mixture until you get the nice sweet sour flavor. 

Fruit week- Dragon fruit

For this assignment I choose dragon fruit as my evaluation target. Dragon fruit in Chinese is “the fruit of fire dragon”. Maybe dragon fruit get this name because of its skin color and the overall shape which made it extremely similar to the fire ball in fairy tales. Dragon fruits likes hot area so it is basically live in the tropical area like southern china and Mexico.

If you cut it in to two part vertically. The inside is white color flesh that sprinkle with black sesame-like seeds. You can eat it with a spoon. It is really sweet in the center and it is getting less sweet and more sour taste when you getting closer to the skin.

There are lots of recipes relates to the dragon fruit. Personally my favorite is dragon fruit salad because you can make it looks fancy so easily and it taste better with other fruits. The natural shape of dragon fruit makes its skin a perfect container. Just easily cut it in half and use its skin as a bowl. Take out the eatable part and dice it to make little cubes. Then you can put it back into the “bowl” we mentioned earlier with other fruits. My personal suggest are the berries they looks absolutely beautiful and taste good. Other fruits will do as well it is really depends on your personal taste.