Other people's comfort food

Comfort food is a very culture-specific thing.  Not always the healthiest food, not always the most decadent food, not always the most complicated food, it's usually simple and hearty and makes you feel like your mom just called you in to dinner after a long day playing outside.

For me, comfort food can be many things: macaroni and cheese, chicken noodle soup, tomato soup and grilled cheese, oatmeal, peanut butter and jam sandwiches with a glass of milk, apple crisp.  The idea of "soul food" comes pretty close, too--fried chicken, green beans simmered all day with bacon and onions, mashed potatoes and gravy. 

Over spring break, my best friends from undergrad and I met up in Chicago for a weekend.  We went to Chinatown and ate dim sum, and as we were leaving one of my friends realized that every Chinese family in the restaurant had a big steaming pot of rice porridge on the table.  

"This place must be known for their jook!  We should have had some," she lamented. By this point, though, we were stuffed and resolved to use the jook as an excellent excuse to come back to Chicago.  I asked Gena, whose heritage is half Chinese, half Japanese,and Inez, who is from Singapore, what exactly went into making jook.

Finished jook: all it takes is a handful of rice, lots of water,
bouillon paste, some mushrooms, and plenty of time.

Jook, also known as congee, is just rice porridge: much the way Americans eat oatmeal, or oat grains cooked in plenty of water until they soften into mush, most Asian cultures have a name for rice cooked the same way.  It sounded easy and nourishing and hearty, and I resolved to try to make some once I was home.

All the rest of the week, I made jook just about every morning.  Not just because it was easy, not just because it was new, but also because it's absolutely delicious.  And here's how you do it:

• First, decide how much you want to make.  It's easy to scale up, and a little bit of rice makes a LOT of jook.
• Measure out the rice in a pan.  Add water, about 8:1 water to rice (yes, 8:1.  So if you use a quarter cup of rice, add 2 c. water).  Add any seasonings you might want, or maybe some leftovers (chicken would be yummy, or I just chop up some raw mushrooms and toss them in to stew a bit).  Bring to a boil, then cover and cook on low until the rice has swollen up and completely softened, maybe half an hour or more.  

  

  Raw egg in the bottom.

• To serve, I eat mine the way Inez says she used to get hers at her school cafeteria: a raw egg in the bottom of the bowl, jook on top, some soy sauce and sesame oil sprinkled in, and a generous helping of chopped scallions.  Take your spoon and stir the egg into the jook, it makes it rich and sort of creamy, a bit like custard.  (The heat from the porridge cooks the egg, no worries.)

Chopped scallions, a few drops of sesame oil, soy sauce go in next.

• A few caveats: white rice is best for this, it gets nice and soft (I used jasmine, which is excellent).  If you can't stand it and have to have brown rice (or if brown rice is all you have), it works fine, but be aware that the resulting jook will be chewier and nuttier-tasting and won't get that creamy, soft consistency.  Also, sticking to traditional Asian flavors really go well with the rice, but I'm sure you could use other flavor combinations, too (get creative!).

Stir it all together, then the best part: eat it!

Sometimes, all you really want is your favorite comfort food: when it's rainy, when it's been a bad day, when you're sick, when you miss home...any and all of the above.  But it's nice to branch out once in a while and try on other cultures' comfort foods: jook is definitely a new member on my list of favorites!

bisous,

Lindsey

Winter Vegetable Feast

These ain't ya mama's brussel sprouts.

When it's cold outside, and Thanksgiving is over, and you're waiting for the first real snow to hit the ground, there's nothing that warms things up like roasting some winter veg in the oven.

I know I'm not the first one on the bandwagon here, but really: simple, roasted vegetables are the way to go!  Nothing tastes heartier or more delicious than slightly crisped, well-seasoned vegetables that the oven has turned into nutritious dinner-jewels.  (okay, I'm waxing a little poetic, but they're delicious!)

The best part, especially now around finals, is that they're way hands-off.  Throw them in the oven, sit down, go through a lecture, pop up to check on them, and there! dinner's all done.

Oven-baked Carnival squash with a pseudo-poached egg
and roasted brussel sprouts

I like to make my winter squash the way my mom used to, cut in half, gutted, and baked in a pan with a little water in the bottom and foil on top until it's melt-in-your-mouth tender.  This takes about an hour to an hour and a half, so it's good to start ahead of everything else.

Brussel sprouts are a new wonder, too.  When I was little, they were awful: Mom would steam them in the microwave or on the stove, and I remember them being a terrible olive color and smelling disgusting, with a texture that was basically mush.  These I halved and tossed with some olive oil, salt & pepper and popped into the oven 20 minutes before the squash was done.

To pull it all together, I wanted a fried egg with an oozy yolk, but decided I'd made enough dishes for myself.  With the squash done, I put it on a plate, cracked an egg in the middle, and covered with plastic wrap.  Microwave for about a minute or two (check every thirty seconds or so!) until it's done the way you like it, and it looks way prettier than the time it takes to make would suggest.

Bonus: you can actually roast squash seeds in about 5 minutes in the microwave! I did not know this was possible.  I washed them and originally was just going to dry them in the microwave, but after a "nuke for a minute, stir, repeat" for a couple of tries, I added a tiny splash of oil and salt and continued microwaving in 1-minute bursts until they were toasted.  It probably was 5-6 minutes total--I didn't really keep track and since I was trying this out I wasn't even sure it would work.  But it was way faster and just as delicious as the oven, without washing a pan afterwards.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that

Pan-fried toast with fresh tomato slices, an over-easy egg, and mustard sprouts.

I went to a family medicine conference at the end of last week.  It was in my hometown, so I got to stay at my mom's house and be pampered by her.  While I had a lot of fun--scoping out all the residency displays and picking up a farm's worth of animal-shaped stress squeezie-things, hanging out with a friend from far away--it was still nice to come home to my own apartment.  However, knowing that I would be gone for a couple days, I had let my groceries dwindle pretty low.  So when I woke up for breakfast this morning, I found one egg and a weird assortment of veggies in the fridge.  A paw through the freezer turned up a little frozen bread buried in the back.  With a pat of butter in the pan, I managed to turn fridge leftovers into a pretty passable breakfast.  In other news--I definitely need to go to the store today.

~Lindsey