Chinese Tomato and Egg.

Rich, jammy and comforting this is my favourite 20 minute 'summer is basically over' dinner to enjoy over rice.

This month on ingredient we’re focusing on tomatoes: literally my favourite home-grown ingredient every single summer (sorry courgettes!)

Tomatoes.

You can already find the recipe for my Quick Tomato Kimchi & Tofu Salad here, and my Sea Bass with White Beans & Blistered Cherry Tomatoes here, but today I’ve got something else Asian-inspired, and something else weeknight-friendly to make for dinner with the glut of end-of-season tomatoes we’re just finishing off! I’ll let you read the intro but this recipe is for paid subscribers; do upgrade your subscription to unlock every recipe in the ingredient archive, and of course to help fund the free part of what I post here! No creative likes asking for money, but without it ingredient can’t function.

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Some of my favourite recipes are written on rainy summer evenings. Often there are courgettes involved, cooked down nice and slowly in lots of good olive oil with garlic, and then folded through pasta or jarred beans, and sometimes I opt for a risotto made with summer produce, such as one made with an ear of sweetcorn from the garden.

Feta.

This recipe is the end result from the first evening I first made Chinese Tomato and Egg, initially working to Kristina Cho’s Tomato Egg recipe on her website (which she’s tweaked slightly for her fantastic book Chinese Enough!)

Tomato and Egg is a classic Chinese preparation of these two ingredients for which there seem to be as many versions as there are home cooks with Chinese roots. Some are light, saucy and loose like this version (and Kristina’s original) and others make a more defined stir fry, like these also excellent versions from Omnivore’s Cookbook and Woks of Life). Obviously I’m not sharing a recipe today which will have as much history and memory attached as some of those I’ve tried, but what I have got for you is how I make Chinese Tomato and Egg as a quick dinner after trying plenty of different recipes for it, and choosing my favourite parts from each.

I’ve written the recipe for two, because I usually make it for just me and some recipes scaling down involve splitting an egg, and obviously, as they’re the main flavour, choose the very best ripe red tomatoes you can find (this recipe is a great way to use up slightly overripe ones!) I’ve also omitted the sugar found in some versions (good tomatoes don’t need it), fresh ginger (because whilst delicious that involves my microplane - ditto garlic - meaning an extra thing to wash up, and omitting it in laziness I realised I didn’t miss it), and white pepper because I know it is something people only have if they do a lot of authentic Chinese cookery. And because at the moment I’m going through a phase where I’m finding it overpowering in even recipes a previous version of myself wrote.

As with most Chinese cookery, the key to this being a super-speedy dinner is to get everything prepped in advance in little bowls (yes I know I said about the washing up, but they can go in the dishwasher, unlike my microplane!) so you can cook at speed. But, I have written the recipe below to do it as you go along, and it is still all manageable in the time it takes for the rice to cook.

Chinese Tomato and Egg

Serves: 2, Preparation time: 5 minutes, Cooking time: 15 minutes

• 1 tbsp light oil