I recently discovered an odd (to me) treat, when I ordered a dish in a small chinese restaurant. it was listed on the menu as "pork with mustard greens," and I was expecting a pork and greens stir fry. Which is what I got, but with a twist.
The greens were pickled. The first bite was so strange to me,and such a shock that I wasn't sure I liked it, but with each bite I enjoyed it more and more.
I asked the owner/cook whether she made the pickle herself, and in accented english, she laughed and told me no that she bought the pickled greens.
When I went to one of our local oriental groceries to find the pickle, I found out why the restaurant owner had laughed. There were so many brands, sizes, and varieities of similar vegetable pickles, that I think a comparable question in an American-style restaurant would have been "do you make your own ketchup?"
I bought a couple in the smallest cans I could find (I was intimidated by the larger jars), and started looking through recipes in asian cookbooks at the library and online, and I came up with my own variation, using American style bacon rather than asian-style smoke-cured pork (which our oriental grocery had, but it was pretty expensive).
Scrambled eggs with mustard green pickle for 2
2 thin slices of bacon (or 1 thick), sliced in small slivers
4 green onions chopped (I use most of the green as well as the white)
4 eggs
1 can of mustard green pickles, drained very well (squeeze out the liquid) and if necessary chopped into uniform pieces (there were a couple big pieces in my can).
(I used Pigeon brand "Fermented Acrid Sweet Mustard Green" The acrid, means "pungent" in this case. It's seasoned with chili peppers so has a little bit of a kick, but no stronger than canned green chiles. There's a bit of added sugar in the brine, but it's not a sweet pickle, it's just a little less sharp in flavor than the other similar pickles).
Drain the pickle really well. I squeezed out as much of the liquid as I could).
In a skillet, saute the bacon for a few minutes, then add in the green onions and cook until the bacon is almost crisp and the onions are soft. Add the mustard greens and stir fry (it starts to smell really awesome).
Add beaten eggs and cook to your preference (scraping and stirring frequently for small curds, less frequently for larger curds or omelet style lifting the edge and tilting the pan to make the omelette, with no stirring).
approximately , 240 calories 2 protein, 1 vegetable, 1 fat
here's what the can of mustard green pickles looks like (top one)
http://shop.waiyeehong.com/?manufacturers_id=229
