Burmese Egg Curry, "Kyat-Oo-Hinn"

I cooked Burmese egg curry yesterday as I chose not to go food shopping in the drizzling rain after finding some eggs in the fridge and the basic ingredients at home. Egg curry is pretty easy to cook if you are not raw to Asian cooking. You just need a little patience and a love of spicy flavour. I learnt cooking from my Dad who is the family chef and egg curry was one of the first cuisines he taught me. 

Chicken eggs are my favourite food since I was very young. My younger brother is opposite to me in term of eating eggs. Two half-boiled eggs in breakfast always scared him when he was a little boy. I used to frequently request my Dad for egg curry and the menu would be lentil soup with vermicelli, egg curry and fried Chinese sausages on that day. Fried sausages were actually for my brother who doesn’t eat egg but I was privileged to eat those as well. These foods remind me of my happy simple childhood. 

Egg is nutrient rich for the third social-classed Burmese people who barely afford just to live a day-to-day life. I remember that when my mum worked in the Falam general hospital in Chin state as a physician twenty-five years ago, her then patients used to bring to her some chicken eggs as the thankful present. I was the happiest child ever counting the eggs in the kitchen cupboard (we didn’t have the refrigerator by that time).

This is the recipe of egg curry for four people. 

Ingredients

8 hard boiled eggs

2 tablespoon of fish sauce

1 tablespoon of tamarind paste

150 ml vegetable oil

3 onions

3 garlic cloves

2 cm fresh ginger

a small bunch of coriander, chopped

1 tomato, chopped

1 teaspoon of chilli powder

1 teaspoon of paprika

1/4 teaspoon of turmeric 

1 teaspoon of garam masala

Tamarind sauce preparation

Put the tamarind pulp in a small bowl and pour some boiling hot water. Leave until the water is warm enough and remove any stones and fibres using your hand or fork. Then make the paste by mashing up.

Directions

Finely chop the onion, garlic and ginger or make the paste of these using blender. 

Half the boiled eggs and fry them until they become lightly golden. Remove them aside.

Add the chopped onion-garlic-ginger or the paste one and chopped tomato in the remaining oil then fry them until the mixture has caramelised. Stir the mixture regularly. 

Add chilli powder, paprika, turmeric, fish sauce and tamarind paste just before the caramelisation.

Add the fried eggs and some hot water to coat the eggs with gravy. Simmer until the liquid has reduced and the oil has come up. 

Scatter with chopped coriander and garam masala.

 

You can eat this curry with rice or bread.
Please let me know your experience of cooking Burmese egg curry by leaving a comment below. Bon appétit! 

 Su Su

Will you fall in love with Burmese music?

Hi guys,

I'm here again. It seems a long time ago I published my first post. Since then as some of you know I've been to the BBC 2012 community reporters scheme to be trained one day a week over three weeks; to brainstorm the stories, for two production days and in the fourth week to make those ideas into short films in mid June. This training was a part of the London 2012 cultural Olympiad. 

The idea of how the World Service could contribute to communities in London was planted a year ago and we were lucky to be happy guinea pigs in this training. This was a good chance for us all to get a taste of the industry and see if the media is a career for us. There were four girls from Burmese community and the Chinese service brought eight young people as they belong to a much bigger community compared to minority Burmese. 

Burmese trainee reporters

London is so diverse with foreigners who came for the greener grass and as such is always lively with different cultures under the usual dull weather. These people have brought flavours, religions, cultures, life styles and the most important thing – amazing and exotic people to London. There are many untold unique stories in these communities and these are worth sharing with wider audiences. 

A Burmese spiritual dancer dancing

We were trained in story development, script writing, interviewing and camera skills by BBC Training department. My favourite topics were storytelling and script writing but my camera skills were so-so. We were provided editorial and technical assistance before and during production. Five short films were made in this scheme, two are from the Burmese community. 

I wanted to make a film about the Burmese migrant workers in Camden market but there were some strong reasons which stopped me to pen that script and tell that story, but one day I will find a way to make that documentary, when I have the help of some eager real-life actors! I therefore chose to document the visiting Burmese musicians and their exotic cultural music. This content is rich, unique and big enough for  a half hour long programme, so it was harsh to scale down into two minutes and something film. The title was decided to be ‘’How do you make London fall in love with Burmese music?’’.

The camera is pretty heavy

The world was the apple and the sky was the limit before meeting up with some conservative Burmese people who were unhappy with us taking the video of the preparation of the Burmese orchestra fundraising gig on our first production day. Those people gained the contract of shooting the official DVD for that gig and they thought that we would spread the video(s) around social networks before their DVDs were released. That nonsense idea is the least thing I would think. It was difficult to explain to those business people what we were actually doing and the situation was tense until the venerable monk negotiated between us. As a result we missed our chance to shoot the actual performance of musicians on the stage, but apart from that minor disruption, the monks and musicians were very helpful and were happy to repeat the interviews or replay the music when the retakes were needed. I am really grateful to these gentlemen.

My teammate Su Mon with our film editor Ron in editing stage

The visit of these musicians is important to the London Burmese community as the traditional instruments are always covered with alter cloths in the monastery unless the pros are in the town. They have performed a few gigs including Daw Suu’s encounter in the Royal Festival hall and BT River of Music in Battersea park to celebrate the cultural Olympiad.

So we've made our little film and I'll be posting the link when it is available online. I’m very delighted that I’ve done something beautiful for my community and adopted a new interest which is film making. :-)

Su Su