Short-Cut Congee

Great way to use your left-over take-out rice. Real congee is cooked for hours and hours, this recipe cuts the time considerably. Congee is pretty much just polenta/grits made of rice. It should be nice and creamy and fairly thin, like porridge. I find it to be great comfort food. It holds heat really well. Use any amount of rice you want. It's approximately a 1:8 ratio of rice to water, but it can be more or less,depending on how thick you want it to be. You can put whatever you want on top of it. Things I like to add are: dark soy sauce, Chinese black vinegar, roasted peanuts, grated ginger, green onion slivers, 1,000 year-old eggs or hard-boiled eggs, baked tofu, preserved Chinese vegetables, green peas, cilantro, etc. Left-over meat scraps go well too.

• Ready In: 32 mins
• Serves: 2

Ingredients

• 1  cup cooked rice, can be really old and dried out
• 8  cups water

Directions

1. Boil one or two cups of water.
2. Puree rice and water together using immersion blender or Magic Bullet or similar.
3. Allow rice to soak in the water for some time. Once the water is cooled you can put it in the fridge for days until an hour before you want to eat it. Make sure that the mixture is liquid, adding more water if necessary, before cooling it.
4. 1/2 to 1 hour before meal time, put rice in a pot and cook on a slow simmer, adding water as necessary. 1/2 hour will do, but 1 hour is better.
5. The more you stir, the creamier and yummier (and less stuck to the pot) it will be.