Century egg with aspargus soup

 

How much you know about Chinese food? Someone said to me that Chinese food is obviously not spicy. But in reality, the Five big Provinces are crazy about spicy food.  However, if you think all the Sichuan food is spicy, you are wrong too.  Chinese food has so much variety, one person could not have every Chinese dish, even if he ate different on each day in his whole life.

I'm talking about persevered duck egg today - have you ever eaten that?  

French people call this egg Century egg, because they had never seen anything like it before.  They were surprised at the black color, they thought it must have been kept too long to make the egg turn black.  Actually we preserve the egg in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, quicklime, and rice hulls for several weeks to several months. The eggs have patterns near the surface of the egg white that are likened to pine branches, and that gives rise to one of its Chinese names, the pine-patterned egg.

In Cantonese cooking this egg is used in porridge with ground pork. In Shanghainese food they use it to make a salad with soft tofu.  They are both really delicious!

But one cannot eat too much this kind of duck egg.  Just like a lot of delicious food it is sometimes not healthy.

Preserved duck egg with asparagus soup

Ingredient：

chicken stock

asparagus(sliced)

duck egg(cut and washed)

ginger(finally slice)

olive oil

salt,pepper

Method：

Heat some oil then stir-fry ginger, add asparagus.  On high heat stir fry a few minutes, then add chicken stock.  Bring to boil, turn the heat down, add the duck egg and cook few more minutes. Turn off the heat then salt and pepper to taste.That's it!