Why hello there, and happy New Year, everyone! This is Kitchen Catastrophes, wishing you all a great 2020. And what better way to start than, well, with great ways to start? I’m your Confident Yet Cryptic Collaborator, Jon O’Guin, and to explain that tautological statement is going to take a bit of time, but for those who want no explanation, and just want TWO new recipes to start the year, click on this link, and the rest of us will have a nice little midwinter chat.  

A Bumpy Start, but From the Heart

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year’s Eve. I myself had a pretty good time overall: I had my traditional two Christmases, attended a friend’s wedding, went on a quick food adventure with Nate in Oregon (Which may become a post, or maybe it won’t.), and swung by two different New Year’s Eve parties, letting me see a lot of friend I hadn’t in quite some time.  But it wasn’t a totally joyous time: as I noted in my Christmas day post, the reason I HAD a Christmas day post is because I was delayed due to damage. My personal external hard drive was damaged coming back from Leavenworth, and the chaos of the holiday season meant that the only real time I had to look into getting it repaired was the last 4 days…where I faced a mixture of things holding me back, from re-entering rehearsals for a play I’m directing, a bit of holiday illness (and no, that isn’t SOLELY a euphemism for hangovers. I was only hung-over for like, 3 hours New Year’s Day.), and some bad life choices/incidents: My chair, at which I tend to write these posts, broke on Friday. Saturday morning, I slapped together a quick repair…only for it to give out again Saturday evening. This triggered SOMETHING in my brain, which demanded that I start a re-organization of the contents of my room…the night before I had to get up early for a tech rehearsal. As such, I’m a little bedraggled and frazzled the first DAY back from vacation. But isn’t that always the way? (Editor’s Note: also, I ended up losing power in the middle of uploading this, so I ended up even MORE frazzled as I finished it up right around Midnight, 9 hours after I intended it to be done.)

Here’s a sneak peek at that food adventure, by the way: some Bomb-ass wings.
Take the gift in the spirit of letting Jon off the hook

Still, I’m feeling hopeful for several projects I’m working on for the coming year, and have even done such adult things recently as “set up an appointment at the vet for what is becoming the family cat” and “voluntarily choose TWO plant-based meals over the course of the weekend.” Personal growth is certainly a great thing. I also functionally ate an entire Domino’s pizza over the course of two days. Progress is a difficult and piecemeal process.

So this year we’re starting off with a pair of dishes that are also kind of ONE dish, and one I’ve been considering making for some time. And as is often the case in my blessed idiot of a life, they’re even thematically tied to the season! Sit down children, as I ladle out some hot bowls of knowledge, because we’re talking about porridge.

Wha-I’m GIVING YOU MORE. We are mid-Giving You More! Stupid orphan.

You’re Hot and You’re Cold, You’re Yes and You’re No

I don’t know why, but that looks like too many apostrophes. Weird. Anywho, you read the title, you know we’re talking about congee. The only question is: what’s congee? And that is a simple question with a (somewhat surprisingly for us) simple answer: it’s the Asian version of porridge.

Yes, porridge, the food group that most people think is just another word for oatmeal, which is…kind of backwards. “Porridge” refers to any dish of cooked grains, while oatmeal, as the name implies, is made of oats. Oatmeal is a TYPE of porridge. (And, because it’s kind of our brand: the etymology of porridge is kind of boring. It comes from people screwing up the word ‘pottage’, which referred to soups or stews, literally “that which is put in a pot”. Assumed to have been messed up because “porray”, a stew of leeks, was also popular at the time. So people asked for “porray or pottage”, and eventually “porrage”. For a modern parallel, imagine enough people ordered “Wagyu New York Steak”, that they just started calling it “Wagyork”.)

“Looks like meat’s back on the menu, Boys!” - The Wagyork.

Congee is the Asian version of the same group, predominantly relying on rice-based porridges (which both dishes today will be), but not technically referring solely to such: you can have oat congee, millet congee, quinoa congee (quongee?), etc…maybe. You may have noted that I twice said “ASIAN”, without specifying a country. You might also note that the two names I used in the title seem to follow different phonotactic rules. That’s because the idea of “congee” is hugely widespread in Asian countries, and is called a LOT of different things. “Congee” is technically the English spelling of the name originating among the Tamil people of India (and neighboring areas), which is more accurately transcribed as kanji. Which we probably didn’t use because that’s the word we used for the Japanese writing style. But the dish is called ALL sorts of stuff: jook, zhu, zhan, bubur, chao, kayu, gayu, arroz caldo (which literally translates as “rice broth”) and more. It’s eaten in over 15 different countries, most of whom prepare it differently.

As such, these are not “the perfect congee recipes”. That’s a fool’s errand to try and attain for another important reason: the cultural weight of the dish. See, congee is a dish that’s very much influenced and shaped by how one’s mother and grandmother made it, because it’s a warm, easy to eat dish that carries a lot of nutritional energy, so it’s frequently given to children, the elderly, and the unwell, or used during the colder months to feel warm and comfy. All of which should sound pretty familiar.

Is it honey? My grandmother had a saying about giving babies honey, I just don’t remember what it was…
Also, sidebar: I made this bowl of soup because I didn’t want to edit someone else’s picture. Which is some kind of like, judo-laziness.

Yes, ‘congee’ is basically the Asian mash-up of porridge and chicken noodle soup: it’s a go-to recipe to give someone who’s had a bad time and needs to get better. Which really underlines one of the great differences between congee and porridge/oatmeal, at least as Americans relate to the latter: Congee is MUCH more commonly savory than sweet. And it is much more VARIED, too.

While I might consider myself avant-garde for topping my oatmeal with almonds, cinnamon, and raisins for a Moroccan riff instead of my typical Apples and cinnamon, Asian congee recipes include such hits as:

-Shredded poultry (chicken or turkey, typically after cooking the rice in a broth made from the same)
- Green onions
- Soy sauce
- pork belly
- Crab
- Mud Carp paste
- Fermented Eggs
-Organ Meat
- Pickles
-Any kind of herb
- Seafood like Abalone, oyster, etc

The only other kind of common side-dish is something called youtiao, which is a salted fried dough breakfast snack, which I don’t want to get too into because it is SUPER important to another dish’s history. (SPOILERS: They’re supposedly the inspiration for churros. Portuguese traders saw Asians eating fried dough sticks rolled in salt and said “what if we did that, but with sugar, instead?”)  And while congee is considered an any-time food, it is a popular way to start the day, which is where my particular riff on it goes. 

A Low, Slow Bowl

I do have to credit Andrew Rea from Binging with Babish as a partial inspiration for this recipe, since it was his Congee from Mulan recipe that inspired me to want to make this dish in the first place, a year or so ago. Despite that credit, I’m not actually using his recipe in some of the particulars. SO let’s lay out what those particulars ARE, exactly.

Congee is fundamentally just “rice boiled in liquid for long enough that it kind of gets mushy and falls apart”. While different rices (or other grains) can go for different times, the BASIC structure I’ve seen in almost every recipe is “somewhere between 5 to 7 cups of water (depending on how wet you want the finished product to be) per cup of rice, cook for at least like, 45 minutes” Babish, in his recipe, went with 6 cups of chicken stock, some garlic and ginger, and put it in a pressure cooker to cut the time down to 30 minutes. But me, I WANTED that time, so I diced some ginger and smashed some garlic.

You messin’ with some real Gs, here, son!

And then tossed it into a pot with 7 cups of chicken stock and a cup of short grain rice (instead of Babish’s long-grain Jasmine, because…I only had short grain in the house), and let it boil for an hour. Because THAT would give me time to fiddle with my accouterments. Specifically, in mimicry of Babish, I was going to do Eggs and Bacon as a topping. But not Babish’s Sunny-side up fried eggs. No, if I had an hour of boiling rice, that meant I had 45 mintues to poach eggs! And if that sounds like way too much time to poach an egg, it’s because I was doing it a very weird way.

With a giant robot dildo?

THAT is the sous-vide circulator I showed you guys I got for LAST CHRISTMAS, and have never used. I’m using it VERY wrong here (it should be in a much taller container, which does not have to be an actual pot or pan, because it is supposed to clamp onto the side.) but it’s actually working relatively well. We’ll do a whole thing when I do something more impressive with it, but the basics: the machine has hot metal parts on the bottom, as well as a system for circulating the water in the container through the hot metal. So it’s continually stirring the pot, and slightly heating the water. This lets it keep the water at a very precise (typically fairly low) temp, and KEEP it there. Sous vide cooking is low-and-slow. So it is that rather than drop cracked raw eggs into simmering water, for this recipe, we drop whole eggs into 142 degree water, and let them cook through over 45 minutes.

This weird looking arrangement is part of the reason you’re not supposed to use the sous vide like this: the pot isn’t deep enough for the circulation to be anything more than basically a whirlpool, pushing the eggs straight into the hot metal. So I had to improvise egg containment protocols.

While that’s happening, I also baked some bacon. I personally almost always bake my bacon in the oven, as A: I notoriously hate popping oil in hot pans on stovetops, and B: I’ve personally found the results are just BETTER. They’re consistent, they free up the stovetop for other stuff like pancakes, and you can dial in the chewy/crunchy divide a little better.  AS everything wrapped up, you season your congealed congee with salt and pepper at the end (not beforehand, since it reduces so much)

And with my congee boiled down, my eggs poached, and my bacon baked, the results were… well:

Cyclopean, due to miscounting eggs?

They were fine, if a little interesting. The egg felt a LITTLE undercooked on the white (maybe because our chickens’ eggs have fairly firm inner membranes), but the yolk was pretty on-point. I accidentally over-salted the congee a little, though I found that stirring the egg yolk into the mix really absorbed that and brought it all in-line. My mother felt there was a little too much ginger, which I kind-of agreed with, and I wished there was a little more garlic. But, in retrospect, Babish went MUCH further out with topping his congee: peanuts, sriracha, scallions, sautéed shitakes, the eggs and bacon, and I’m pretty sure I’m missing something, so he probably had the slightly blander porridge as a canvas for all his toppings, and the extra sweetness helped offset the salty top. Personally, I found it a little bland with just a touch of unusual ginger sweetness until I added some chili oil and umami powder to the bowl.

While a little weird, I did also find it a pretty compelling dish, and one I want to continue experimenting with. So I’ll do so. Right now. With a second recipe.  

Seven Samurai

The second recipe is included for two reasons: firstly, as I joked with the chili recipe last decade, I do try to think of my vegetarian and vegan readers when I can. Secondly, I figured I was going to make two variations of congee, to show its versatility, and while I was looking at options, I discovered Nanakusa Gayu, a holiday version of gayu, the Japanese style of congee. Specifically, the Holiday is January 7th, aka, TOMORROW. (editor’s note: Well, today, after that power outage.) That felt like an amazing confluence of means and motive, so I decided to make it. And IMMEDIATELY ran into problems.

Because the thing is, nanakusa means “Seven Herb”, and it’s called that because, surprise, there are seven herbs used in the preparation of the dish. The idea is that, on the seventh day of the new year, you make and eat a simple gayu (also spelled kayu) of just rice and herbs, to help your body digest the heavy festival foods you’ve been eating thanks to the New Year. And, again, as a man who ate an ENTIRE LARGE PIZZA, that was a motive I could relate to. Here’s the problem: y’all ever heard of Shepherd’s Purse? Cudweed? Nipplewort?  Yeah, it turns out that most of the seven specific herbs used in the recipe aren’t really eaten in Western countries. Which is a real bummer, because apparently there’s like, a little holiday song you sing to remember all the ingredients (imagine if “Are you Going to Scarborough Fair” was actually a beef stew recipe.)  As such, I had to improvise.

I would make a joke here about “most of my improv is in comedy, not cooking”, but I actually once did a mostly improvised comedy cooking show in a park, so this is actually entirely in my wheelhouse.

And I actually had to improvise a LOT, because it also turns out that like, the three sites I checked for recipes all agreed “hey, if you don’t have the herbs, just use what you can find that’s in season”…and then NONE OF THEM GAVE ANY MEASUREMENTS for the herbs. Well, one of them did,  but it didn’t specify if that 5.5 oz measurement was by weight or by volume. I ASSUME volume, because, like, 5 ounces of fresh herb by weight is like, 3 cups. Meaning there’d be 3 times as much herbs as rice in this rice porridge.

As it was, it was like, 2 parts rice to 1 part herbs.

So I went my own way, while trying to encompass some of the same ideas and flavors in the core seven. So we ended up with turnip greens (an actual original), watercress (to replace radish greens), chives, tarragon, mint, baby dill, and baby spinach. I figured that was a fairly nice blend of sweet, bracing, savory, etc. So I stirred it all in, and served it up.

And was promptly reminded that “green things wilt in heat”, making the half cup of herbs seem more like a quarter of the mixture.

Turns out, I massively undervalued how much flavor the chives, dill, and watercress were bringing. Like, the primary flavor notes were hints of anise, and some bright mint notes. And as a result, while by no means bad, the porridge…didn’t really do much of anything. It tasted a little minty, and a little like licorice, but otherwise it didn’t really register much at all. Which maybe was the point, after all, it’s meant to be something of a palate cleanser, but I really think it could have been better balanced.  But hey, starting off the year right can be tough. It’s important to celebrate even partial successes.

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THURSDAY: MAYBE WE’LL TALK ABOUT THE SOUS VIDE MACHINE, OR MAYBE I’LL TALK ABOUT THAT REVIEW I MENTIONED DOING.

MONDAY: WE STAY SOMEWHAT SIMPLE, BUT MUCH FANCIER WITH A CHEESY LITTLE PUFF OF A PLAN.

RECIPE

“Morning Dragon” Congee

Serves 4-5 

Ingredients

7 cups chicken stock

1 cup rice, rinsed

1 clove garlic, smashed

1 ¾” knob of ginger, peeled and finely chopped

Salt and pepper to taste

5-10 eggs, poached

5 pieces bacon, fried

Other toppings as desired (chili oil, fried garlic, chopped green onion, etc.)  

Preparation

1. Add the rice, garlic, ginger, and chicken stock to a large saucepan or medium pot. Bring to a boil.

2. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer until rice is texture you desire, stirring as desired to increase starch and break down kernels.

3. Once rice is at desired consistency, ladle into bowls, and top with egg, bacon, and other desired toppings. Eat warm.

Nanakusa “Americano” Gayu

Serve 4

Ingredients

1 cup short-grain rice

Water

Seven herbs of your choosing, preferably fresh. (I used Dill, Tarragon, Turnip Greens, Watercress, Spinach, Chives, and Mint, but you could also use Basil, Fennel, Chervil, Cilantro, anything that’s fairly light and fresh, and not too overpowering.)

Salt

Preparation

1. Rinse the rice until the water runs clear. Place the rice in a pot with 4-5 cups of water. Allow to sit for 20-30 minutes to allow the rice to plump up.

2. Then, drain the rice, add 5 cups of water, and bring to boil. Once boiling, stir the rice, cover the pot and reduce to low heat, simmering for 30 minutes without opening or stirring.

3. Then, remove from the heat, and let sit, covered, for 10 minutes, for the rice to absorb remaining hot water.  During this time, chop herbs finely. Add the end of 10 minutes, remove the lid, and stir in chopped herbs with some salt for seasoning. Serve warm.