I sort of fell out of the Cradle of Flavor today, starting with the best of intentions and ending with an unresolved international incident.
I decided I was going to cook my favorite dish from my trip to Singapore: Hainanese chicken rice. But there was no recipe to be found in the Cradle. I wasn’t up to the task of making black pepper crabs (or chili crabs, another Singapore favorite for which there wasn’t room in the Cradle) at 8am, so I decided to look for a really . . . easy . . . dish.
I found a promising dish in “telur mata sapi bumbu,” fried eggs with garlic, shallots, chiles and ginger. I took out an egg from the refrigerator in order to let it come up to room temperature (this is an essential step in fried-egg cookery if you want your eggs to come out nicely). The recipe calls for three eggs but I only wanted one. I then thinly sliced a garlic clove, all the while wishing I had the appropriate Microplane product.
The recipe calls for frying three eggs in a little peanut oil in a 12” skillet, one at a time. That struck me as inefficient: a 12” skillet should be able to accommodate three eggs at once no problem, indeed most people I know don’t even have a 12” skillet, their collections max out at 10” because that’s what fits comfortably on a standard burner on a 30” range if you’re also cooking anything else on that range. But I wasn’t going to break out the 12” skillet to cook one egg anyway. It just didn’t seem ethical. So I used a 7” skillet. This is me cooking an egg, in corn oil because I didn’t have any peanut oil:
My plan had been that, while the egg was cooking for about two minutes I’d cut up a shallot, a chile and some ginger. This is the problem you face if you don’t do your mise en place. Not only was it impossible for me to cut up all that stuff in the time it takes to fry an egg, but also it turned out I didn’t have any shallots, I didn’t have a chile and I didn’t have any fresh ginger.
The following minute was as tense as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Ten Days that Shook the World all compressed into the 60 seconds that shook East 93rd Street. I first considered the option of abandoning my egg. After all, an egg only costs like 10 cents, though maybe this one cost 30 cents on account of being Sauder Organic. And this is New York City, where there are three Korean-owned markets within one block of my home (two within half a block) where I could acquire all the missing ingredients easily. But if you live in the northeastern United States you know what the weather was like, and the Depression-era mentality of my grandparents was haunting me on the issue of throwing out an egg. So, I improvised.
Shallots: that wasn’t going to happen, however I did have some dehydrated onion powder around. Maybe a shake of that.
Sliced red or green chile: I first thought about cutting up a dried chile, but that seemed a bit much for one egg. So I went with some crushed red pepper flakes, and a squirt of Sriracha red pepper sauce.
Ginger: none of that around either, but is there ginger in Chinese five spice powder? I don’t know. There wasn’t time to Google it. So I just figured I’d add some of that.
Then I thought about other Asian-inflected ingredients that might work, since the Cradle was already rocking so much that the breaking of the bough was imminent. So I also added a little sesame oil, and a dash of black vinegar. The recipe recommends some rice wine vinegar, which I actually had, so I put that in too.
By this time my egg was finished and my oil, as recommended, cooling a bit:
Also by this time, a small crowd had gathered in the rain outside my window. This group of about two dozen Indonesians and Malaysians was holding placards like “The Cradle Will Fall,” and “Roundeye Go Home,” the latter of which seemed strange because I was at home. I also received a fax from Singapore sentencing me to caning and one from Malaysia sentencing me to death.
Before the organizers could get an injunction in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, I proceeded to sautee my remaining ingredients:
I then poured the sauce/condiment over the egg, ate it (it was surprisingly tasty) and went back to sleep.
I hadn't really expected people to be so supportive of the idea. 
