No-Fry Sambal Scrambled Eggs

There's an easy trick I love to use when it comes to preparing a light savoury snack at home - microwaved eggs. It's really simple to prepare and can literally be done in 5 minutes flat! Here's an example...

Sambal Scrambled Eggs

Ingredients

• 2 eggs
• 1 heaped tablespoon of sambal paste, preferably the kind mixed in with other ingredients
  (In this case, it was a sambal mixture that my Peranakan grandmother had prepared - sambal chilli paste fried with ikan bilis aka anchovies and some onions. In Singapore, you can normally get these pastes from the supermarket or any nasi lemak, Malay or Peranakan food stall.)

Instructions

Really simple...

1) Beat both eggs in a bowl and mix in a good amount of sambal mix to taste.

2) Microwave it in the same bowl for 35-40 seconds. This timing may depend on your microwave. But it should be half-cooked.

3) Take it out and stir it so that the entire cooked ring of egg is in the middle of the bowl as shown below. The cooked egg should be somewhat floating in the rest of the uncooked egg.

4) Put it back in to microwave for another 20 seconds. You may have to do one last scramble and maybe another 5-10 seconds of microwaving. I normally like my scrambled eggs slightly undercooked so it is not dried out. Ideally, there should be faint traces of uncooked egg when you're done.

5) Enjoy!

If done right, the egg should be moist and ever so slightly runny. The sambal sauce gives the egg a lot of savoury and spicy flavour, with the onions and ikan bilis (anchovies) giving the egg some texture as well as nutrition.

What's best, it can be done in a jiffy - as I said, 5 minutes flat without exaggeration. And there's no frying, no extra oil (other than what's already in the sambal chilli sauce) and no extra pan used. So after your snack, the only things you'll have to wash are the bowl, the fork you used to beat the egg and the spoon you used to eat it! ^_^

Comment on microwaving: I've come across many people who're averse to microwaving food... but I think much of the reasons behind this aversion are not founded on science (physics and medical sciences, both of which I have training in). Based on my formal education and what I have read, I will share my opinions on three points:

• Microwaves used on food don't cause cancer in itself, especially if you use well-made ceramic ware. Any carcinogenic effect could be due to using cheap plastics used for takeaways which melt into the food. Or possibly wax-coated paper packaging. But any method of cooking could cause this besides microwaves. Ceramic ware will withstand high temperature without disintegrating, so they should be safe to use.
• Microwaves coming directly in contact with the human body could, naturally, harm you - if nothing else then by heating you up. But as long as your microwave has the proper microwave-barriers (and I believe most do), this shouldn't be an issue at all. If you are concerned, you don't have to avoid microwaving at all... you can just take leave from the kitchen as soon as you push the "start" button on the microwave, then come back in when it's done.
• One valid concern is super-heated uniform and non-viscous liquids like water or tea, which could explode into your face if you put your face near it. Firstly, I think this is *extremely* unlikely for eggs cooked in the manner I have talked about. A simple precaution when dealing with liquids like water is to use some mittens to shake it first, before taking it out of the microwave, so any super-heated gas or liquid will escape. Once you have shaken it a bit, it should be safe to take out.