sick food

Been sick the last few days. No temperature, just really really tired and the whole sore throat, stuffy/runny nose, sinus headache and all that good stuff. I don't think I recall having a cold which knocks me out the way this one has been.

"Waie sick" (likes to eat) as I am, I even cancelled a much looked-forward to dinner with some friends of mine so I can stay home to rest.

I spent the entire weekend craving for nothing but soup-type comfort food. I ended up making a large pot of vegetable chowder last night and a beef and vegetable barley soup a night or two before that. The barley soup was pretty easy. I started out heating up some vegetable barley soup from TJ's. Something seems to be off ... so I decided to add a can of beef stew to it ... ummm ... much better.

The chowder started out as a clam chowder, but I only noticed that I don't have any clams at home after I got the thing started. I decided to add some corn to it and make it a corn chowder. The outcome wasn't bad. It was actually pretty good, except that it seems to be missing something. Yeah, I know ... clams!

Other old stand-by "sick food" was me has always been either "jook", which is a thick rice soup, or oatmeal. The jook, I usually like. Mom used to give us all kinds of other goodies to go with it when we used to have it for breakfast or lunch (roasted peanuts, pickled cabbage ...). Somehow, the oatmeal was not quite the same. Don't get me wrong, mom did they well. It was sweetened with sugar, usually made creamy with milk and curiously enough, an egg drop. It was good, but somehow, probably because our family don't usually eat a whole lot of oatmeal unless we were sick, I've always associated oatmeal with being sick; thus never really care of it much.

Well, off to the store I go for some clams so I can have some proper clam chowder.

Happy New Year!

There's been an increase of mention of Chinese "Comfort" food lately. There was an article this past week about "Hot Pot". It's oddly comforting to be sitting in front of a steaming pot of hot broth, throwing in whatever food item strikes your fancy (meat, veggies, seafood, tofu ...) especially when weather's a bit on the chilly side. We've been going through rainstorms lately. Yes, these are actually RAIN, not the usual drizzle that we Californians run to shelters for. Hot pot has been all I can think about the last few days for dinner. I went and drove by the Shabu-Shabu place near my house and they were PACKED! I guess I'll just have to wait for another night to go.

New Year's Eve was good. H and I went to D's house to cook up a seafood feast. We had originally wanted to get some crabs, but they were sold out everywhere I went. So ... we settled for some jumbo prawns, steamed clams and D made a large pot of clam chowder. All in all, it went well. I even brought along a bottle of champagne (gift from some vendor) and enjoyed it along with our meal. With my tolerance for alcohol, I had to go lie down soon after we finished with our meal. So ... while D and H were sitting there watching TV, and I was laying on the couch taking my much needed post-alcohol "nap". D was sitting next to where my head was and I kept hearing him clapping and trying to wake me up. Apparently, I was snoring rather loudly. All in all, it all went well ... even without the crabs.

One sidenote: the recipe for the clam chowder called for some flour to thicken it. D didn't have any. We ended up sending H around the block to borrow a cup from the restaurant we go to quite often. How neighbor-ly huh?

It's New Year's Day and we're sitting around waiting to go yum-cha. It's gonna be crowded!