Eggs here in Japan are sold in very fresh state. They have expiry or best before dates on their packages, usually two weeks from the day they are out in the supermarket. Within that period, my husband eats it fresh-- just break it on top of warm rice and mix. When it goes more than two weeks in the fridge, I make omelets and tamagoyaki. All for my husband.
I've just always been bad at eggs. Since I was five, my grandmother would always offer me about two thousand yen if I eat one whole hard-boiled egg. That's a very big amount for a five-year-old and back in 1993 when a kilo of good rice was about thirty-five yen in my country. But I never accepted the challenge. Well, until I needed the money when I was in college and ate just half of the egg because a thousand yen was all I need, but that's another story. What I'm trying to say here is, I've just always been bad at eggs. Haha. Except for eggs in cakes and breads. Yes, I'm also not good with puddings. So all these egg recipes go to my husbands tummy. And this tamagoyaki recipe is his favorite among the different variations of it I've made him eat without me tasting. At all. Hehehe. So try it for yourself and color your lunch boxes with this tamagoyaki recipe, then tell me how it is, yay!
Ingredients
1 large egg
mirin, 1/2 tsp
VCP, 1/3 tsp
carrot, 3 g (minced or cut into small cubes)
bell pepper, 4 g (minced or cut into small cubes)
nori, about 1/4 sheet
Procedure
Crack egg into a bowl, scramble well. Put all the other ingredients (except nori) in the bowl. Mix well.
Place a nonstick pan over low medium to medium heat. As soon as it's hot, lightly grease it with cooking oil.
Pour the egg mixture onto the pan and spread it by turning the pan sideways until the mixture is thinly spread over the pan's surface.
Before the egg gets fully cooked (while the surface is still a bit wet), quickly choose two opposite sides and fold it about 1 inch in. At this stage, it is better to turn heat to lowest.
Place nori on the edge of one unfolded side and from there, start rolling towards the opposite side.
LEFT: For stages 4 and 5, it should look a bit like this. However, I folded this one quite late because I had to take a picture. It's better if the egg is still a little wetter than the one here. Also, I used to use the rectangular pan meant for tamagoyaki but it is definitely doable even with regular pans. :)
Another version of tamagoyaki that earned a voluntary "the egg today was delicious" comment from my husband was when I used small bits of eggplant (instead of carrot and bell pepper), a bit of milk (instead of mirin) and cheese slice (instead of nori). I've had better days with tamagoyaki rolling but I didn't have a chance to do a pictorial aside from when they were already in my husband's bento box:
On the left is one of my proudest tamagoyaki days.
On the right is when I was watching a morning TV show while cooking this for my husband's lunch that day and ended up burning the edges and over cooking up to the surface-- which made it difficult to seal the rolled state because the egg was too dry to bind when rolled. Don't watch TV while cooking this! Hahaha.