Comfort Food #3 - Chinese Meat Loaf

The weather in Perth is finally becoming jacket weather. Colder weather calls for comfort food, maybe because we all tend to hibernate more and stay in rather than go out. You eat more of comfort foods, so it can help us beat the cold, as we need to eat more to get more energy to generate heat in our bodies to keep warm.

I have previously written about two of my comfort foods.

Comfort Food #1 - Tianjin preserved cabbage meat ball pasta soup

Comfort Food #2 - Rice Congee

This is my third comfort food that I cook a lot of – Chinese meat loaf.

This dish is a combination of a meat loaf and omelette. It’s a hearty home style dish that I grew up eating, I always looked forward to my mum cooking it, it may be just a mixture of pork and eggs but it is flavoured with two of my favourite ingredients – shittake mushrooms and dried scallops.

This is one of those dishes where there is no definitive recipe and every family would have their own recipe. My family puts in dried scallops which are expensive but I love the flavour that it adds to the dish and I think that it brings everything together.

It’s not very fancy as you can see, it’s not something that you can make look pretty on a plate – it’s just spoons of steamed pork mixture on top of rice.

Ingredients

• 300g mince pork
• 2 sprig spring onion (use bottom third, mainly the white part with a bit of green), finely diced
• 2 dried shittake mushrooms, reconstituted and finely diced
• 2 dried scallops, reconstituted and finely diced
• 1 teaspoon oyster sauce
• 1 teaspoon fish sauce
• 1 teaspoon soy sauce
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon ground white pepper
• ½ teaspoon cornflour
• 5 eggs whisked with ½ teaspoon of soy sauce and ¼ teaspoon of salt

Method

Thoroughly mix together the pork mince, spring onions, shitake mushrooms, dried scallops, oyster sauce, fish sauce, soy sauce, salt, white pepper and cornflour in a large bowl. Cover and refrigerate for one hour.

Add the eggs to the pork mixture and thoroughly mix together, breaking up any clumps of mince pork.

(There are two ways that I mash the pork and the eggs together – (1) using a spoon and mashing the pork mixture against the side of the bowl or (2) mashing the pork mixture between two spoons).