Wannabe Congee with Poached Egg & Peanuts

From sweet rice - to savoury rice!

Now, congee to me - after having googled a little - looks like a dish that is basically made from a base of "overcooked" rice, kind of the way you would with a risotto to make it lovely and creamy.
Basically, I have called it "wannabe" because I used 10 minute rice to speed up the process a little, and I never had any Spring onions, so I had to use a little chopped red onion instead. Also, in the other recipe, they used about twice as much water as I did.

I was a bit sceptical I must say, only boiling the rice with no salt or anything, but you know what? The sauce you serve with it has a lovely sweet and spicyness to it that makes it very easy to like!

Wannabe Congee with Poached Egg & Peanuts
(Serves 2)

I am definitely going to poach an egg the proper way next time the recipe calls for one!

For the rice:
50g rice (I used bornw 10-minute rice)
1 1/2 cup boiling water

For the sauce:
1/2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sriracha
1 tsp mirin
1 tsp honey

Topping:
1 chopped Spring onion
A poached egg
1 tbsp roughly chopped peanuts )or you can use some leftover pulled pork if serving carnivores)

- Start by boiling up the rice. In the original recipe, a rice-steamer was used and it was boiling for one and a half hours! I however, decided to just cook it for 20 minutes, allowing the rice to puff up properly and almost breaking apart.

- 10 minutes in, make the sauce, simply by combining all the ingredients in a small bowl. Five minutes later, get some water boiled and poach the egg! I didn't want it to fail as I haven't practised my poaching skills enough, so I used a poach-mould. My egg got a little overdone as I only found out on a late stage that covering with a lid hurried up the process big time and allowed for the egg to cook more evenly from top to bottom - go figure!

- Once the rice is done (make sure there is a little water left), top with the sauce, Spring onion, chopped peanuts/pulled pork and finally the poached egg!

To end this post, I will add a photo of how I decided that the egg-poach-pouch should be used, aftraid that if I let it float on it's own, the egg would end up drowning...

Have you ever tried congee, or something similar before?


Original source:
http://www.with-an-open-mind.com/2013/04/22/congee-2-ways-asian-comfort-food-at-its-best/

- Jules