What's a person to do when you're at lunch in a random food court in a random shopping mall and you don't feel like having the typical choices for your meal?
What's a person to do when you've got a variety of stalls offering chicken rice, duck rice, yong tau foo, economical rice, fishball noodles, porridge, nasi padang and ban mian- but you don't feel like eating any of them?
You go straight for what's familiar to you.
You go straight for what makes you think of home.
Steamed egg and steamed pork were family favorites for weekend dinners. The Parent was fond of preparing seamless, easy-to-prepare meals and between the stove, the rice cooker and the slowpot cooker, the latter two were her preferred.
If we were making steamed egg, we'd beat the eggs together, pour them into this special enamel plate and place it in the rice cooker. If we were making steamed pork, then we'd go down to the wet market downstairs, buy xx grams (I never knew how heavy) of minced meat from the butcher and then bring it back home, marinate it, pour a beaten egg over it to make it stick, pat it into the special enamel plate, tear up some strips of salted fish and then put it into the rice cooker.
I can't say that the prep methods of the stall in this food court are the same, neither can I say that the texture of the minced meat is as well balanced as the way we do it at home, and we don't put a salted egg in lieu of salted fish, but when you really don't want noodles or yong tau foo or economical rice but want something steamed with a slight vibe of home even during lunch time, well, these two dishes just gotta do.