Jook
I made jook for the first time yesterday afternoon. For anyone who isn't familiar with what this is, you basically take the carcass of a turkey or chicken, boil the hell out of it until you can easily pull the meat off the bones, and then add salt and white rice. Then you boil the hell out that too until you end up with a creamy white soup. Then you add stuff into it. Like soy sauce, shredded lettuce, green onions, peanuts, etc. Sometimes you'll also see it listed on Chinese restaurant menus as congee.The first time I heard of jook was before Mr. Q and I even started dating. We were good friends, though, and he spent Christmas eve of 1998 at my house. I was recently divorced and couldn't and/or didn't want to visit my parents in Germany. EC was with her dad's family. I had spent Thanksgiving with friends - who wanted to go have Thanksgiving dinner at a casino. I vowed to never put myself through something like that again. Mr. Q was getting ready to move back to California in February and had decided not to spend the money to fly out for Christmas. So I invited him over for Christmas dinner.
I made a lovely dinner of Cornish game hen stuffed with wild rice and cranberries, glazed carrots, and probably some other side dish (salad maybe?). Also, entirely too much wine - both red and white. We probably watched a movie or two and then Mr. Q retired to the guest room and I went off to my own room.
The next morning I was toying with the idea of using the cornish hen carcasses to make soup, when Mr. Q told me that his family always made jook during the holidays. (He is a whopping 3/8 Chinese.) After he explained what it was, I said "well...I've got chicken and I've got rice...." He said:
Yeah, that's just what I need. Some corn-fed white woman making me jook.
So that's the main reason I'd never attempted it until now. Even though I found out the very next year that his mother is every bit the corn-fed white woman that I am - and she's been making him jook for years.
posted by Legal Quandary at
09:57
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