Tomato and egg on rice is the most comforting thing I know how to cook and I'll teach you how

At the risk of sounding like someone who always brings up study abroad, the first time I had tomato and egg on rice was when I studied abroad in Beijing my junior year of college. The program was language-intensive; we all stayed in a school building, had local students for roommates, and weren't allowed to speak any English. We also ate lunch in the cafeteria every day. 

Honestly not much at the cafeteria was that good. Bad dumplings, wan greens, fried rice. But tomato and egg is pretty uniformly decent, no matter the context or scale, as long as it's fairly fresh. As an activity, one of the school cooks taught us all how to make it, and I've been making it ever since. 

Jess refers to the dish as "soft lunch" because I used to make it a lot when we were both working from home. Well now we all work from home all the time!!! "Soft" is appropriate because mush is the main feature of the dish. The stir-fried tomatoes, which turn into something like quick-cook pasta sauce, mix with the runny scrambled eggs to form a semi-homogenous substance that's greater than the sum of its parts. You absolutely must spoon the soupiness onto a bowl of white rice, which nicely absorbs the excess liquid. (Some people do noodles for this dish but I don't think they're absorbent enough.) 

Sound unappetizing? It kind of is, until you taste it. Look ugly? It's supposed to. This is home cooking. To me it's best when the tomato part takes on an inexplicable tinge of Chef Boyardee. 

Wow I really wrote one of those ambling pre-recipe blurbs huh! I prefer recipes that are more like physics equations where you can play around with the variables, so this only represents my personal process. 

1. Chop garlic. Chop green onions into thumb-size lengths of stalk and a handful of thin rings for garnish. Cut tomatoes into eighths like orange slices (I like two medium-size tomatoes per person, resulting in more tomato mush than egg).

2. Saute the garlic and green-onion stalk in canola oil until they're browned and aromatic. Do not remove from the pot (ideally a wok but mine needs to be cleaned). 

3. Throw in the tomato quarters. Smash the tomato quarters down with your spoon to break the skin and release more juice. Once liquid-y, add in maybe a tablespoon of soy sauce (or more if you're doing more tomatoes) and ideally some hoisin sauce or fermented bean paste, gives it that funkiness. A dash of black vinegar is good, too. The whole mixture should take on the texture of chunky pasta sauce, maybe? Depends on how mushy you want it. You don't want just liquid, that's gross. Bits of skin and whole tomato are good.

4. (Sorry I forgot to take more photos.) Take out the tomato sauce from the pot and clean it out a bit. Put some oil in the pot and scramble eggs. (Two eggs per person is good if you have the two tomatoes.) Make sure they don't get too cooked!! Leave it pretty runny. Then when the eggs are just about where you want them, pour the tomatoes back in and mix everything together quickly, you don't want it to get more cooked. Then put it into a different bowl.

5. Serve it over rice and eat it hot with a spoon! Add some sriracha or chili flake or whatever you want. Throw the green onion garnish on. 

What did YOU eat for soft lunch? Sound off in the comments. And post photos of your tomato and egg rice.