It’s stir-fried tomato and egg season

Let’s get sentimental

It’s September and the tomato vines are turning yellowish. You can almost feel the desperation of those last few fruits determined to reach ripeness amid the dying leaves. “Gimme, like, one more week! I’ll be worth it!”

August and September tomatoes are dark and tender to the touch like they might burst. Their edges might wrinkle up a little bit, but they’re still delicious, sweet and heavy with tangy liquor. 

This is my favorite time of year to make stir-fried tomato and egg—itself a near perfect lunch.

Food journalist Francis Lam wrote a beautiful essay about this simple, satisfying hallmark of Chinese home cooking in the New York Times in 2017: “In Chinese cooking, this dish is like air, present and invisible.” (How great is that line?)

I didn’t grow up eating this like Lam did, but tomatoes, eggs, scallions and rice are foundational ingredients to my eating life and cooking education, and almost never absent from my kitchen. I started making this dish a lot when I was in culinary school, and it remains in heavy rotation in my lunches for one. 

I’ve never followed a recipe; instead I chase a certain magical end result—saucy with layered umami and tang, rounded out by the richness of egg and always featuring a piquant top note, which in this case means plenty of green onion. 

I imagine no two stir-fried tomato and egg iterations are exactly the same, much like all beloved dishes of the home-cooked realm: Sunday red sauce, stuffed cabbage rolls, rasam. And isn’t that the most beautiful thought? That even the smallest variation will yield the exact flavors that give the eater a moment like Anton Ego in Ratatouille, when their feet tingle and their eyes well up as they’re teleported to their childhood kitchen with its specific smell, look and lighting, having just come in for lunch after falling off their bike.