Despite the absence of some of the ingredients, I’m in the process of making congee again.
The first time I made it, I used chicken broth to cook the rice; when it was throughly cooked and broken down, I added cooked ground pork and dressed bowls the stuff with fried shallots and chopped green onions. The next time, I used turkey broth and included chopped turkey left over from Thanksgiving.
Today, I’m using chicken broth again, but I have no shallots. I may try it with onions. Or I may just wait until tomorrow to complete the dish, giving me an opportunity to run out and buy some shallots. I’ve decided it’s a good idea to keep shallots around, like onions, because they work so well with so many dishes. I’m not sure what meat I’ll use in today’s (or tomorrow’s) congee; maybe I’ll explore a version in which vegetables such as carrots or brocoli stand in for the meat. Time will tell.
On other matters of taste, my sister-in-law made a wonderful habanero-based salsa the other day called dog’s nose salsa (because it makes one’s nose wet like a dog due to the heat). I went through a jar of the stuff very quickly, hungering for more. She had been unable to find habanero peppers locally, so a friend sent her some. Yesterday, she and my wife visited the local Walmart, where they found habanero peppers! That find brought to mind a habanero salsa I concocted a couple of years ago and made me want to try it again. Her salsa used fresh tomatoes, while mine is the lazy man’s version with canned tomatoes. I suspect a comparison between the two will leave me favoring hers, because of the fresh ingredients; again, time will tell.
Thinking of habanero and congee in the same short brain-span makes me wonder whether a habanero-laced congee with seafood as the meat protein would be as good as it sounds to me this morning. I bet such a concoction with a fish like tilapia and, perhaps, some shrimp and/or clams would be wonderful. I may just take some time this morning to explore such possibilities online, trying to find whether anyone else has done more than think about the combination. Whether or not my ideas are unique, I’m adding a real-world test to my list of things to do.
