Spicy Beef Toast

Welcome back to another episode of "Experimental Cooking with Limited Ingredients!".

The dish today was inspired by those yummy French Toast you get in Hong Kong style restaurants like Kim Gary. Well, at least that was the base idea lah.

As usual, the toying with ideas session got a little out of hand. First I decided I wanted some meat and potatoes in there as well. Perhaps a hybrid pizza-toast thingy? Should I roast or bake it instead? Would prawns and mushrooms go well with the dish? At one point, I was even considering how to include fruits and perhaps coffee beans.

Eventually, after hovering around the fine line between the impactical and the possible, the Spicy Beef Toast was born.

Ingredients used:
* a quater can of corned beef
* mashed up hash browns (I'm out of fresh potatoes)
* Hot Sauce + Bird Eye chillies
* tomato ketchup or pasta sauce
* sliced bread
* 1 egg
* Chopped onions
* mayonaise
* soy sauce, salt and pepper

I first precooked the toast fillings.

Stir fried all the ingredients, minus the egg, bread, and mayonaise.

The fillings were then spread out generously on the bread. Squirted on some mayonaise to add on to the unhealthy goodness.

The egg, well beaten and seasoned with some salt and butter, was used to coat the bread.

After giving the bread enough time to soak up the egg (about 1-2 minutes), it was pan-fried on medium heat to golden perfection!

From past experiments, I learnt that I could get a crispy tasty crust on the bread if I fried it with a generous amount of butter. Yes, that's another dot added to the heart-attack probability chart, but what the heck, it's worth it.

Oh, and frying with butter on a hot pan seems to build up a lot of smoke. However, heating up a little oil in the pan before adding in the butter seems to alleviate the problem.

You know you've done it right when you can get a clean cut through the crispy crust to reveal the nice juicy core.

I had some extra filling and was too lazy to cook another toast, so I just layered it on top, and finished it off with another coating of unhealthy goodness. (Don't worry, I usually use low fat, light mayonaise. Hehe.. )

Spicy Beef Toast! This would definitely not be the last time I'm making it. I'm getting hungry all over again just thinking about it.