Eggs and Fried Rice

It would be a good idea to learn how to cook eggs properly since (I think so, anyway) they're a staple of the American breakfast, and of breakfasts from most other places. Like other foods, eggs can contain salmonella and other diseases or sicknesses that could make you or the person eating them sick.  It wouldn't be very fun to cook breakfast for your mom or someone in an effort to be to be nice and accidentally make that person sick. Eggs are also very versatile too, though, so knowing all the different ways to cook and use them would also be a fun learning experience.



A hard boiled egg. Picture from MyPersianKitchen.com



In the kitchen yesterday, we learned how to cook eggs four different ways: fried, hard boiled, scrambled, and poached. You can eat these eggs in a variety of different ways. Personally, I always eat my fried egg on toast. I think it's really great on lightly toasted bread with maybe a little bit of butter or jelly. Other people eat them with sausages or bacon or just by themselves, which is also how some people eat their scrambled eggs. Scrambled eggs can be used in several other dishes too though, such as the fried rice that we made yesterady. Poached eggs are used in making eggs benedict (which is something that my grandma happens to love). Eggs benedict is sort of like an egg McMuffin, only I imagine that it is much less nasty than what McDonald's would serve you, haha. It's made of maybe an English muffin, sausage, and a poached egg. Hollandaise sauce is added to it for some extra flavor. Hollandaise sauce is egg a mix of egg yolk and butter and is seasoned with white or cayenne pepper. (Hollandaise sauce information from here.) At home, my family uses hard boiled eggs in salads or we'll just eat them by themselves at breakfast. In Germany, they love eating hard boiled eggs for breakfast. Every house has special tiny cups for holding their eggs. They're usually eaten with bread, cheese, and sliced deli meat, which is a typical German breakfast.

Below are pictures of the three other kinds of eggs that we made. . .

A fried egg on toast. Picture from dashrecipes.com



A pair of poached eggs. Picture from the-foodist.com



Scrambled eggs. Picture stock  from despositphotos.com





Fried rice. Picture from genaw.com



Fried rice is very simple and very cheap to make. Your rice must always be precooked before you start adding in all of your goodies, so that's the first step in making the dish. You can use white or brown rice to make the recipe. After making your rice, set it aside and heat up a skillet. You'll need to add a little bit of oil, and then once it's warm enough add in your chopped onions and garlic. Now would also be the time to add in any vegetables you'd like, like carrots, peas, broccoli, etc. After that, add the rice and pour some soy sauce in, being careful not to add too much. Stir it up until the soy sauce has coated everything and your veggies have gotten soft, and then you're done! If you would like to add in some precooked meat, like chicken or beef, now would be the time to do that as well.

Here is a recipe for fried rice with duck and plum sauce that sounds absolutely delicious! Sadly, I don't even know where to buy duck around here except for at the Pacific Ocean Market, and going in there makes me feel a little bit squeamish. . . so the chances of me trying this any time soon are slim. But I can still dream, right?