Labor Day Funsies

As a foodie with no particular travel plans this past Labor Day weekend, I partook in a few events involving much food.  There was the dinner at Sakedokoro Makoto (which I reviewed and posted food porn for in my previous post), a cookout co-hosted by my friend from My uMai and yours truly, and some simple Chinese dishes to fill in the gaps.

The cookout, I must say, was a fantastic 5-hour bash incorporating food (all home-made, mostly by Mai), drinks (beer, wine, sake), and games, both indoors and outdoors.  I hung out with friends and made some new ones, an activity that good drinks are likely to facilitate.  My friend Mai wrote a nice summary of our cookout on her blog, so I encourage you to check out her thoughts for the delectable menu and more.

In preparation for a weekend of eating, I snacked fairly regularly on fresh fruit, yogurt cups, and other simple edibles.  Contrary to misconceptions, starving oneself does not increase eating capacity; however, eating regularly does.

And so one of the simple dishes I found myself making late Saturday morning was Chives Stir-Fried with Eggs (韭菜炒鸡蛋).  Those familiar with Chinese home cooking paradigms will likely know this one.  On the other hand, those not familiar will probably start to see a trend: there are a lot of ways to stir-fry eggs.  In fact, one might consider an analogy between all the different stir-fry preparations of eggs and American yogurt.  For your scrambled eggs with tomatoes, there's peach yogurt; for your chives stir-fried with eggs, consider strawberry yogurt; and for the sake of completion, let's compare green onion stir-fried with eggs to blueberry yogurt.  The point is, it is not so foreign an idea to enhance stir-fried eggs (pretty much scrambled eggs) with other natural ingredients.

This particular dish comes in many varieties, including an omelette-like form, a scrambled eggs type of preparation, and a more loose type of stir-fry where the chives are completely separated from the eggs.  At my parents' home, the omelette-like preparation is most common; I elected to prepare this dish similar to scrambled eggs.

After finely dicing slightly less than 2 cups of chives, I sprinkled some salt to taste and added two eggs.  I beat the eggs and then poured the mixture into a pre-heated skillet.  Stir-frying and scrambling the eggs did not take long.  Since this preparation of eggs tends to brown easily, it is important to keep on stirring and flipping (until just the moment when there are no longer any runny components).  After around 5 minutes on the stove, the finished product emerged:

On a final note (if you have read this far), the Mid-Autumn Festival, celebrated in many parts of Asia, is coming up on Monday, September 8th.  I am planning to do something somewhat challenging, and hopefully very rewarding if I get it right.  Stay tuned for the results!

Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes for the Chinese American Soul

The concept of "comfort food" began to creep into conversations during my high school years, but I personally avoided that terminology because it confused me.  Comfort foods as discussed in those conversations were often sweet or rich, usually high carbohydrate edibles that had some likelihood of being fried (with the exception of things like chicken noodle soup).  I thought to myself: those foods don't make me feel comfortable after eating them.  I enjoyed the sweetness or richness temporarily while I indulged; but without fail, I always felt physically or mentally sick (or both) after I had finished such foods.  What made those comfort foods when they do not comfort me at all, I wondered.

Enter the upperclassmen years of college.  The summer before junior year, I asked my mother to teach me the basics of her culinary abilities so that I could feed myself with neither a meal plan nor reliance on anyone else to regularly feed me.  One of the first things I asked her to teach me was Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes, pictured below and known to practically every Chinese-American as 西红柿炒鸡蛋.  (Yes, I own Big Bird bowls.)

Confused, my mother asked me why, of all things, I wanted to learn to make that.  She gave me many reasons for why she should teach me something else: the dish was simplistic, too easy to make, not that complex in flavor profile, and so on.  Not to put words in her mouth, but she may have been thinking to teach me more difficult things that would automatically cover the simpler dishes such as this.  I had no response.  I just wanted to know how to make it--and how to make it well.

That was the beginning of my understanding of comfort food, not as a specific ethnicity of food or even a methodology of producing and consuming food like take-out or home-cooked.  I began to understand comfort food as a byproduct of upbringing and cultural norms.  Whereas ethnic foods are loosely bound by (and continue to evolve within) the cultures that created and defined the food, comfort food is more nebulous.  And whereas there are some ubiquitous characteristics of an American upbringing that--evolved out of European origins and--lend themselves to certain ideas of comfort food, those characteristics do not restrict this category of food.

As Wikipedia has appropriately defined it, comfort food is something traditionally eaten that evokes feelings of nostalgia or sentimentality.  Rich, sweet foods may evoke comfort for some folks due to individual biology, upbringing, cultural origin, etc.  And I admit that, with no anthropological aspirations, I am hardly doing justice to this topic even for an opinionated blog post.  For myself, a more outspoken foodie than most, food that comforts me takes on a more cultural and personal tint.