Fried simmered eggs

Simmered food is very familiar and popular in Vietnam. That kind of food has some good benefits such as non-greasy and perfectly seasoned. My grandmom and dad usually cooked fried simmered eggs for family parties when I was still at home. Actually they always cooked the eggs with pork (bacon). It's such a long time I'm away from home and my eating habit has been being changed more or less. I don't really eat pork for the whole year round.

For those who didn't know how simmered food looks like, this is a short description for simmered fish: http://www.vietnamfood.org/entry/ca-kho-simmered-fish.html

Some days ago, just suddenly I needed some Vietnamese food badly. I was like feeling fried simmered eggs on my tongue. I was missing its pattern in my mouth as well as its well-seasoned taste. What came had come, I ran into the kitchen and began cooking even though it was too late at night . I just cooked eggs alone, no pork (bacon).

Image source: http://www.camnanggiadinh.com.vn

For my personal taste, here is the ingredient and recipe (for general reference, not precise though):

• 6 to 8 eggs
• fish sauce
• sugar
• hot and black peppers
• minced garlic

Optional:

• fried or raw purple onion
• a tea spoon of flour
• green chives (onion leaves)

The cooking recipe is extremely simple but it took plenty of time.

1. Boil eggs around 10 minutes or until they're cooked by your own experiences. To avoid broken shells, you may want to add a pinch of salt while boiling.
2. Drain them under cold water or let them cool.
3. Peel their shells off, be careful and don't break the egg white.
4. Use paper towel to absorb water on the egg surfaces (to avoid splashing oil when you fry it at next steps).
5. Warm up a small pot with oil. You may consider adding enough oil so that it should cover a half of an egg.
6. Wait until the oil is really hot, put the eggs one by one into the pot and fry them. Depending on your personal taste to fry eggs completely brown or just partly. I like to fry them fully since I love the cooked skin.
7. Finish frying and put eggs on a paper towel to absorb all the extra oil.
8. Sift the oil and put into a glass container for later using. Leave around one tea spoon of oil in the pot.
   (if you don't want to use the same pot or deal with hot oil, just let the oil cool and put away later.)
9. Now, lay the pot on stove and cook the oil at high temperature. Put all minced garlic and mix them until turning to light brown.
10. Put all the eggs into the pot and around 6 to 8 tea spoons of fish sauce. Mix them well around 20 seconds. Put around 2 or 3 spoons of sugar and keep mixing them all around 2 minutes.
    (I don't cook sugar at high temperature to make brown color. I use food color instead. You can put 3 drops of dark black food color to make the food more attractive.)
11. Add some water to make the extra sauce. I can think about adding fresh coconut water if I'm at home. This sauce will be extremely good for dipping veggies later. Using like salad dressing.
12. Add hot and black peppers to let them cook some more minutes. Try to taste and adjust the flavor as you like.
13. Mix flour with a little water and pure them all into the pot. Cook for 2 minutes and turn off the stove.
14. Put fried onion and onion leaves if you like.

Here was what I got at the end.

I took the picture at night and the light condition wasn't very good, but who cares? I couldn't wait to put them all into my stomach . Don't be panic when you see a lot of hot peppers there. Actually, they're peppers grown by me and I didn't know why they are not hot at all. For the best, I'm just consuming them like sweet peppers or veggies.