Noni posted:
I got really sick this past month and ended up eating a lot of crock-pot congee. I haven't seen a single word on congee in this thread, but the next time any of you are ill, I highly suggest it.
If someone needs a recipe, the basic one goes something like this:
Ingredients needed:
-Rice
-Salt
-Chicken or another broth. If you have duck broth, use that. Ducks are well known for their brothiness.
Optional ingredients, for when you aren't sick:
-Shredded meat, be it duck, pork, chicken, or "meat"
-Eggs
-Peanuts
-Ginger
-Shiitake mushrooms
-Green onions
-Sesame oil
-Oyster sauce
-Fish sauce
-Pepper sauce
-Soy sauce
-Picked vegetables
-Duck eggs or century eggs
-There are probably 100 other possible congee additions
Instructions:
1. Painfully wake up in your sweat-ridden bed and belch forth a solid three minutes of profanity against an impotent but vengeful god who hasn't yet been able to sack up enough juices to kill you. Your gravelly cries should be punctuated by deep, phlegmy coughs.
2. Now that you're sitting upright, it's time for the ritual clearing of holes in your head. Your idiot doctor wants a good post-sleep sputum sample. Fuck him and that "I'm not giving you antibiotics yet because I still think it's viral" crap. He might change his mind when you fill up this mayonnaise jar full of nickelodeonesque green slime and chuck it through his clinic window with a note wrapped around it: "Mostly from left lung. Right to follow."
3. Decide you should probably try to eat something.
4. Go to kitchen wearing blanket from bed. Shakily collapse on the stairs during the journey. Sit and think about how stupid stairs really are and how, now that you see them up close, you really need to vacuum them more. God damn this illness has made your IQ drop like a stone.
5. Dry heave.
6. Get to the kitchen and eat something random.
7. Wet heave.
8. As you sit on the floor in front of your toilet, ponder about eating a gentler food.
9. Look at yourself in bathroom mirror. Jesus christ. Just look at yourself. Is that thrush on your tongue? Dear god, what the hell is wrong with you. If you tossed some glitter on your face and called yourself Edward, you could easily be chest-deep in fat girl blowjobs right now.
10. In a feverish daydream where beautiful, scantily-clad women are ladling some kind of food to you, remember congee.
11. Fill a crock-pot with rice and broth (or, fuck it, water) at a ratio of about 1:10. If you weren't sick, you'd probably add some shredded duck, pork, or chicken. Then maybe you'd add some ginger and shiitakes. You might add eggs towards the end of cooking. That's right. Eggs cooked into congee may be the only way that you'd be able to keep down any protein. Salt that shit. Fuck it, add MSG too. MSG never hurt a goddamn person.
12. Go back to your bedroom. Take a random smattering of the roulette-like series of medications that have been suggested, prescribed, or concocted for you over the past weeks.
13. Because light makes your head throb in and out like it's the final boss from Contra, relegate yourself to listening to a few hours of shitty, soft-voiced audiobooks on low volume.
14. When you hear the earth-shaking bass once again from your neighbor's car stereo, run outside with your pale, green skin and puke-covered robe and tell the knuckle-dragger that if he doesn't turn the stereo off, you're going to spit in his mouth, then rub vomit all over his car and shit diarrhea onto anything he might touch in order to ensure that he contracts this same illness. Surely, that's what you meant to say in your head, but what he and his buddies hear are the incoherent, hoarse, frog-like ramblings of a hacking madman.
15. Back inside, realize that you forgot to turn on the crock pot. Go back to step 9. Then have a serious, child-like fit. Collapse in the corner of the kitchen floor as a spent, husk of a man.
16. Reflect on your newfound, near-unemployment because you work in a building chock-full of cancer patients, which means no work until you're fully healthy.
17. Check your phone messages. Skip the messages from people who jokingly ask if you're still alive. Wonder what your doctor's nurse means when she says you should come back in at your earliest convenience.
18. Go lay in bed and contemplate if this is when you're meant to die. Drift off to yet another session of vivid, sweaty, nightmare-ridden sleep. Even in your nightmares you are somehow ill and broken. You don't even try to fight the the evil puppetmaster scientist as he puts your brain into the body of a dog and makes you watch as he sodomizes your vacant human carcass. Then you sit in a dog pound waiting to be euthanized, but all that anyone hears of you trying to speak are barks, and you don't even care to bark anymore. Even the old nightmare that you've had since you where 5 years old is ineffective. This is the one where you are shrunk to an inch of height and forgotten. Your tiny dream self just lays down and readies himself to die, not even attempting to attract the attention of the giant friends and family who tower above.
19. Awaken and go eat congee. Soy sauce is probably the only thing you'll be able to add and stomach.
20. Go back to bed with a belly full of lovely congee, which you're surprisingly not throwing up. Listen to more audiobooks, and then again drift off to sleep.
21. Wake up in the hospital. Be given a stern reprimand from doctors and nurses, as if you purposely brought this shit on yourself because you have a fetish for potassium drips and ass-less gowns.
22. Hear, in so many guarded, doctorese words, that your physician fucked up. Oh well, at least now you practically have a six-pack from the coughing-based ab workout.
23. When you get to go home, make and eat lots more congee. Now that you have full-on ciprofloxacin-assisted thrush, it's pretty much the only thing that you can eat without pain.
Anyway, congee is pretty good shit.