Shrimp & Scrambled Eggs with Corned Beef Hash

I didn’t intend to post about my home cooking adventures three times in a week. But as the name of the blog indicates, I write mostly about what I eat. And between having a sudden rush of ideas for things I wanted to cook and feeling the need to take a couple extra days between long-roll sandwiches, that’s how it’s worked out. 

Actually, one of the two dishes for this post came about in large part due to unforeseeable circumstances. As I’ve gotten into the habit of doing in recent years, I took advantage of my local supermarket’s post-St. Patrick’s Day sale on packaged corned beef. I then proceeded to screw up its preparation and was left with a dilemma over what to do with it.

The unfortunately chain of events started when I decided to change things up by baking the corned beef in the oven instead of boiling it, as I’ve always done before. The first step in the recipe I followed called for soaking the meat in cold water for a bit before prepping it for the oven. I forgot to do that and merely rinsed it. That wasn’t good enough and the finished roast was way too salty. 

While my sweet-tooth is prodigious, I tend to struggle with ultra-salty foods and knew that eating all that corned beef throughout the week would be difficult. It was almost as salty as country ham. Fortunately, I noticed that we had a half-full bag of small potatoes on our kitchen counter and immediately decided to make hash. But I still didn’t want the meat to be so salty, so I cut up the finished roast into a few smaller chunks and soaked those before dicing them into bite-sized pieces

I did that, along with the rest of the peeling and chopping required to prep for making hash, the night before. So it was just a matter of throwing the onions and potatoes into a lightly oiled cast-iron pan to get started Monday morning.

Here is where my next set of problems started. First, I probably should have used the 12-inch cast-iron pan that is down in our basement. But I grabbed the more convenient 10-inch one that was in the kitchen, and it wasn’t quite large enough for the amount of food I wanted to fry in it. 

The onions also should have taken a turn in the pan on their own so they could start to brown a bit before being joined by the potatoes. It took a while for them to soften and the potatoes to start to brown just a bit in spots in that crowded pan.

By the time I added the corned beef, some of the potatoes had started sticking to the bottom and that was making it impossible to get additional browning or a harder texture on the rest. No amount of scraping with my flat wooden utensil would improve the situation. There must have been some potato pieces that were too soft and they had flattened – probably when I pressed everything down to create a pancake for browning purposes – and were essentially caked onto much of the pan’s bottom surface.

Eventually I realized my effort to get the hash to the desired level of crispiness was futile and decided to cut my losses by taking the pan off the heat before even more of the food stuck to the bottom.

I shoveled all of the hash into a large plastic container and moved on to preparing the other half of my big breakfast.

One could argue that nothing goes better with corned beef hash than eggs. While that traditionally means a couple of them over-easy or poached, I thought outside the box this time around.

In my most recent post on a Chinese restaurant, I mentioned that I had intended to order a dish called Shrimp with Scrambled Eggs, but it was no longer on the menu at Shiao Lan Kung.

This dish – which is just slightly more complex than its name indicates – only popped onto my radar in the past 10-15 years after coming across it at several restaurants in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. It quickly became a favorite – but I haven’t had it since probably a year or two before Covid hit. I’ve been craving it though – especially since missing out on having it last month. So I decided to take the bull by the horns and make it myself.

Not surprisingly, there were a lot of recipes online – most of them similar, with slight variations – but I opted to go with this one. We already had almost all of the ingredients on hand. I just needed to pick up some shrimp and was also going to get scallions, as called for in the recipe, but decided to go with chives instead.

The fragrance that perfumed the air from the small amount of sesame oil I mixed into the eggs – along with white pepper, salt and water – was intoxicating and brought back memories of the dish’s distinctive flavor.

After adding more salt and white pepper – along with a little cornstarch – to the shrimp, I threw them into a lightly-oiled nonstick pan and let them go on both sides over low heat until cooked. At that point, they were thrown into the egg mixture, which was in-turn tossed right into the hot pan.

Once you’ve got the eggs in the pan, the key is to not allow them to overcook. In fact, if you’re going for authenticity, they should be loose – bordering on or even a little runny. I probably left them in there just a few seconds too long. They weren’t well-done by any means, but they should have been a little looser. 

Having said that, they still tasted fantastic. The sesame oil and shrimp make this much more than a run-of-the-mill eggs dish. And they went beautifully with the corned beef hash, which wasn’t crispy, but still was very satisfying from a taste standpoint.

To close this one out, here is a short video of Shrimp with Scrambled Eggs being prepared that came with the recipe I linked to above.

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I’m adding this postscript Tuesday – the day after I made the corned beef hash. There was enough of it left over for several servings and I experimented with one of them by throwing it into my toaster-oven for a couple cycles on broil in an effort to give it a more crispy texture. While the result wasn’t perfect, it was certainly an improvement over what I had eaten the previous day. I imagine it would have been even better if I had let it go for another cycle or two, but I was hungry.

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Thank you for indulging my cravings. Barring the unexpected arrival of another one that requires me to cook, this should end the run of posts on my kitchen adventures, at least for now. I’m sure there will be additional such posts periodically going forward. 

In the meantime, I’ll be back Friday with a cheesesteak review. I’ve suddenly got a back-log of steaks I want to try or revisit and need to get moving on that.