Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge

EDIT: Someone complained without leaving their name or a way to communicate. Their criticism was invalid since I later realized they thought I was talking about the generic Korean word for soup, ‘kuk’, instead of ‘jook’. So nevermind and just enjoy the soup and beware the Internet.

I could open a fast food place called Mapgirl’s Jook Joint. (I’m quitting my job any minute now to open this place…) This is for Caitlin at Clutter2Cash & Madame X at My Open Wallet

Jook. That’s the Korean name and I think the Chinese name too. My Cantonese-American girlfriend from college calls it jook. I think I’ve heard it for Mandarin as well. It’s a rice porridge made with chicken. I have a hard time eating a whole chicken myself so I make this with a cornish hen. (My mom was really happy to find out that the American supermarket has this small chickens that fit into a regular pot. What will America think of next?!)

This is really easy recipe, but you can’t be too squeamish about the meat part. It’s not anything more than sticking your hand inside the bird. The other thing is knowing what’s a good consistency for the porridge, but I’ll get to that too.

Jook

1 whole cornish game hen, dressed and clean
garlic to taste, approximately a 1/2 bulb (or more!)
4-5 dried dates, or a handful, depending on your pot size
1/2-1 cups of sweet rice/glutinous rice
1 cup regular rice (short grain ’sushi’ rice, not basmati)
6+ cups of water
salt & pepper to taste
chopped scallions for garnish and taste
ginger (optional)

Start boiling the water in a medium size stock pot, enough to submerge the bird and more. Wash and rinse your hen. In the cavity, stuff in the sweet rice about 1/2-3/4 full. Once the water is boiling, put in the rice-stuffed bird.

Boil for about 10-15 minutes and skim the water of any scum that forms on top. (Lid on, lid off, it’s up to you really. I keep the lid on for most of the cooking)

Add peeled cloves of garlic, more is better if you ask me. Add the dates, not too many. It depends on how much you are making. Add a chunk of peeled ginger if you like.*

* A word of caution. Peeled ginger when boiled, looks a lot like a boiled clove of garlic. While you can bite into cooked garlic without reprisal, ginger keeps its bite. I used to hate that taste as a kid which is why I can’t stand really gingery foods. Total ick. My mommy fishes it out for me now, but sometimes she forgets.

So the hen boils along for a few hours, not a roiling boil, but not just a simmer either. You want to eat this bird during your lifetime. Skim any fat if you like that sort of thing. I do, but I try not to obsess on the low-fat front.

Ok now here’s the tricky part if you’ve never had rice porridge. What consistency do you want? It’s not a pudding, but it’s thicker than a soup. You want add any remaining rice (both the sweet rice and the sushi rice) to the water and continue boiling. But you don’t want to add too much! And how much water? This is where I can’t be of much help. You want to add enough to thicken the soup, but not so much that you run out of water. The size of your pot effects this a lot so don’t use a really large one unless you scale this up for a chicken. You don’t want to keep adding water because splashing cold water on the rice makes it do funny texture things. So boil a little water in another pot and if you need more water for your jook, use the hot water to thin out the soup.

How do you know when to eat? It’s up to you. When the meat is fully cooked, you can take a knife and hack off pieces of the hen and ladle out the rice and broth, laying pieces of meat on top. Keep adding water to the pot to stretch the soup. Keep boiling it until the meat falls off the bone easily. Pull out the carcass and pick off any good bits and toss them back into the pot. Throw away the carcass.

Add the scallions on top of each bowl and stir them into the soup when you eat. Make sure you chop it thinly, not a mince, but bias cut strips of both the green and white part.

Confused? If so, please email me. I think I’ve made this more complicated than it actually is. I don’t even think about little details while I cook, but when I write this kind of recipe out, I realize how much knowledge my mom has and how much of this kind of cooking is done by looking and feeling.

Why is this economical? Well, conceivably you can leave this on the stove or in the fridge overnight and keep adding water and more rice and eat this for breakfast all week long. It’s a nice breakfast in the winter. You get nummy garlic to ward off germs, a little meat protein, and hot food for breakfast. As a dinner, I need to add kimchee or pickles to the meal, but I could eat 2 bowls of it easily. I add tons of salt. I could save a lot of money if I gave up on cooking and put a salt lick in the kitchen. I love sodium.