This is interesting. Found a lost posting on my story blog, which is now dead. This was dated March 3. Am re-posting it out of order. Woohoo!

Congee

At least, that's what they tell me.

Anyway, the last time we were at my Mom's, she made porridge. At least that's what I called it. My wife heard that and was weary of it, thinking it was oatmeal or something. And I'll tell ya, the stuff scores a zero on the presentation scale. Looks like mush with chunks. But my wife had a bite of it, and decided that she liked it. I asked my mom how to make it, and later I remembered that it was often referred to as Congee. Basically, it's rice and water/stock and maybe some meat. It's the most unfanciful type of Chinese food, kind of a cheap way to feed a lot of mouths with a minimal budget, which historically, was probably quite useful for my ancestors.

So, after so sparse and vague instructions from my Mother, I decided to give it a whirl today by buying a whole roasted chicken earlier on. Then I filled the pot with what I gathered to be a fair amount of rice, drowned it in water, and started boiling away. I ignored it for a while and when I stepped back into the kitchen, I started laughing. Well, apparently instead of a congee like consistency (watery rice) I got a full pot of rice. So now I have a ton of extra rice for fried rice, another ingenious way the Chinese like to get rid of their extra food. So I got rid of half the rice, then put more water in it, then chicken stock. After a while, I put the chicken in and realized that a whole chicken was probably too much. Now it was just watery rice with a lot of chicken. But thankfully, I just simmered it for like almost a hour and a half, and most of the rice simply turned into mushy stuff, and it was actually quite good. Everyone enjoyed it, though I have to say the presentation still needed help. Looks like it should be served in the mess hall or something. And yeah, we still have like 2/3 of the congee left.

Anyway, enough of that. Alex and I had a buddy day today, just running chores and being buddies. Went shopping and found out that my coworker's husband works on motion pictures, doing compositing of sorts. Had worked on "Van Helsing" and the remake of "Manchurian Candidate" on his home in Bellingham. How cool is that? Apparently he doesn't get to see a lot of stuff, just snippets of footage that he has to remove the wirework out of or whatever else. Sigh. Talking with her made me realize how far away I am from what I want to do.

Well, if I could only make a fortune selling videos of my baby...