Pasta salted egg salad recipe

While shopping for the pasta ingredients, however, I decided on a crucial switch. I was at Meidi-ya supermarket looking at the various brands of cheery tomatoes on offer and none appealed. They didn't look nice, were not organic and were costly.

Normally, I would buy organic or at least compost grown cherry tomatoes from Jusco in Malaysia, at less than half the price of what I pay for regular ones in Singapore.

I reluctantly picked up a packet and was about to finish my marketing when I saw some big red pomegranates. They were almost "calling out to me". They looked good and, at S$2.10 a piece, seem reasonably priced.

"Heck the tomatoes," I thought to myself. This is cheaper and more exotic. I felt the sweet sour taste of pomegranates would go well in my pasta with salted egg salad recipe.

My friends enjoyed it. One described it as having "an explosion of flavours".

Pasta with salted egg salad recipe

• 4 itlog na maalat or Chinese-style salted eggs, cut into small chunks
  
  
• 2 stalks celery (organic if available)
• 1/2 carrot, cut into fine cubes
• 4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1/2 large pomegranate (slightly more than 1/2 cup of "seeds")
• 1/4 cup toasted sunflower or pumpkin seeds
• 2 sprigs of fresh coriander
  
  
• generous pinch of sea salt
• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1/4 cup natural vinegar (see note #3 below)
  
  
• 300 grams dried pasta, cooked according to instructions.
  
  

Method:

1. Mix the celery, carrot, garlic and salt and allow to stand while you cook the pasta.
   
   
2. When pasta is ready, toss with the salted eggs, pomegranate, oil and vinegar.
   
   
3. Serve this pasta salted egg salad recipe with toasted sunflower / pumpkin seeds and coriander leaves sprinkled over the top.
   
   

Notes and suggestions:

1. I enjoy eating some raw garlic occasionally. It is very pungent on its own and this is one way to eat them with other flavours masking the pungence. If you find raw garlic too strong, fry it first with the olive oil, then toss into egg salad recipe before adding the other ingredients.
   
   
2. I've added a bit of salt because I find that most salted eggs nowadays aren't very salty. But if your salted eggs are, indeeed very salty, then omit the salt and maybe even use fewer salted eggs.
   
   
3. This time round, I used Japanese brown rice vinegar. Other vinegars will do just as well, eg balsamic vinegar for a more Italian taste (although I wonder how the Italians would take to salted eggs!). In my original Filipino-style pasta with salted egg salad recipe, I recommended one of the many different vinegars found in Filipino cuisine - made from coconut, sugar cane, nipa palm, pineapple, etc etc.
   
   Whatever the case, do not use cheap artificial vinegar. That is not suitable for human consumption.
   
   Note also that good quality vinegars tend to be mild-tasting, without that sharp bite. Once, at a dinner with macrobiotic teacher Michio Kushi, he passed around some vinegar that, he said, was "made according to a thousand-year-old recipe". It was so mild we could drink it straight.