Steamed Egg Roll

In Chinese, the egg roll can be roughly divided into two types. The general one is a sweet snack with flute-shaped pastry and flaky crust. The other one is steamed egg roll I would like introduce today. It's a savory main dish with meat stuff and egg skin. I have not ever seen before in restaurants or friends' home except my home in Taiwan. My mom said that this dish is come from the main land China.

The appearance of steamed egg roll just looks like cylinder-shaped omelet. The transection looks like Maki-zushi(rolled Zushi). My mom always cut a whole egg roll into several sections.
The origin of this dish is that we celebrated Chinese new year by our fortune because the steamed egg rolls signified gold. Some Chinese would instead cook many egg potsticker(dumpling) signified gold ingot. However, egg roll has more meat than egg potsticker so that I like egg rolls relatively.

I think the egg skin is simple to made by everyone. The meat stuff contains minced pork, green onion, and seasonings such as salt or pepper just like stuff of potsticker. But potsticker usually contains vegetable and sesame oil. And my mom would put mashed ginger to raise tasty. Even someone would put corn, shrimp, conpoy as well.
Maybe you can use beef instead of pork, onion instead of green onion and put corn into stuff. Then sprinkle ketchup over it. The steamed egg roll can catch your stomach as well.

Pastel de Nata (Portuguese-style Egg Tart)

Pastel de Nata once was very popular in Taiwan a few years ago. No matter bakeries, street vendors, restaurants, Egg Tart exclusive shop, and even fast-food chain, every store was crazy to sell it and everybody was crazy to eat it. However, after the prevalence passed away, the imbalance of supply and demand led to the only one chain store survived so far. Fortunately, my mom already learned it at that time. We have a lot opportunities to enjoy Pastel de Nata.##CONTINUE##

We call Pastel de Nata "Portuguese-style Egg Tart". It's very clear to know it comes from Portugal and spreads to Macao (Portugal's colony), then to Taiwan and other countries in East Asia.
The major difference from traditional egg tart is that its tart skin made by pastry. So it has soft inside and crisp outside. The best pastry skin must be layers of clear.
The stuffing would be relatively simple, just like Custard. The primary materials are milk, yolk and sugar. We never add water into stuffing so that it tastes richer flavor.
After putting stuffing into tart skin, bake them until the surface becomes brown and even a little burned black.

Today there are so many flavors of Pastel de Nata on commercials: coffee, cranberry, caramel, brown suger, maple syrup, and Mochi. Especially Mochi egg tart is new developed flavor. Mochi was used in my mom's previous work - Taiwan Mooncake. When the new commercial was catching our eyes, my mom couldn't wait to prepare new type egg tart. Not long after the delicious hot Mochi Pastel de Nata was entering everybody's mouth. I'm so lucky to be able to eat immediately! How great my super mother is...