The city is an ice rink right now. Within the last 48 hours we had a deep freeze, a huge thaw, and now we’re back to cooooold. Eastern-seaboarders, that has to happen at least once every winter, right? All I’m craving is something hot and cozy, but I’ve been especially ravenous lately and the idea of a thin soup won’t cut it tonight. I scrolled back through some recipes and found this rice cooker congee I made last year. It’s so easy that there’s hardly a recipe to speak of. Don’t worry about not having anything to flavour the water, congee can be made with nothing more than salt, and if you don’t have a rice cooker with a congee setting, check out this simple stovetop recipe for the rice-water proportions you should use.
To make my dinner even healthier, I might make my congee with brown rice tonight. I was worried about it not having enough starch content to get a congee-like consistency, and then I found a tip: throw in just a little mochi or some heavy-starch white rice! I’ll give it a try and report back.
Update! January 20: The starchy white rice seems to have worked, but my rice cooker assumes I’m using white rice for the porridge setting, so I didn’t get quite the desired slight soupiness I was after. I will try this on the stovetop instead so I can control the water and texture better.