I live at sea level. Right now I'm up in the mountains, and as often happens, the first few days well....there's digestive distress. I wanted a bland breakfast, and I love jook or congee anyway.
We didn't have any white rice in the pantry, just long-grain brown rice, so the current edition's ingredients:
- 2/3 cup long grain brown rice
- 6 cups liquid (for this iteration, I used 2 cups of chicken broth & 4 cups water. If you aren't using a broth, add a small amount of salt, like 1 teaspoon)
- 2 inches of whole, fresh ginger, peeled and sliced into thick coins
- 2 tablespoons Ovaltine*
Place the ingredients into a dutch oven at least 2 quarts in size. Bring the mixture to a boil and either
- reduce the heat and almost simmer, for 2 hours
- place in a 225 degree oven for 2 hours.
I chose the latter. In either case, stir occasionally.
I liked the finished product a lot.
*About the Ovaltine: congee or jook is usually made with white rice, and is blindingly white when finished, which I think is part of the appeal as a convalescent food or hangover cure. But this iteration was already sort of an off-putting beige, and besides, the broth was too bland. So I thought, what about mashing up mole and jook? We didn't have any chocolate other than Ovaltine, so I went for it. While the odor of malt and chocolate was evident while it was cooking, the finished jook didn't have an obvious chocolate or Ovaltine flavor, just sort of ...meaty.
I refrigerated the batch, and prepared it as follows:
- Ladle the desired serving into a microwave-safe dish
- Nuke until hot
- Garnish with your choice of: slivers of last night's meat, a bit of lettuce, some parsley, top with beaten egg and nuke again briefly to cook the egg through (you know, the egg-drop soup idea, only with porridge), some chopped fruit, or some dried fruit bits.....
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