FEISTY wrote:I've become quite fond of you on this site and I'm sure you will survive some kind of SHTF situation much better than menickdutch wrote:Practiced making "Congee" a kind of porridge of a savory nature made from rice. My congee for lunch was rice, brown lentil, onion, vegetable stock.
Basically cook it to buggery and blend it and the result can be very nice. A very warming cheap meal. Maybe the addition of coconut oil would have given it a je ne sais quoi, but seasoning it with crushed black pepper and some sea salt made it fantastic.
It was quite hard to believe that it was a scrubby cheap meal. However, I believe that without the addition of the stock it would have been bland as hell.
You can make up your own congee recipe, mine was using value basmati rice as thats what i had on hand, but people use anything including buckwheat, quinoa and allsorts and add all manner of veggies to it.
I think that congee is a more Chinese dish. Mine probably lacked that chinese flair and probably tasted too English, but what the heck.. Your innovative recipes remind me of Mrs Cropley (God rest her soul
Thanks for the compliment.
If my cash flow is good, I have my raw baby spinach and all manner of healthy stuff, but still experiment with cheap ghastly foods and try and learn how to make them not only bearable but also appetising, the kind of thing you look forward to rather than the kind of thing that you eat with your eyes closed whilst visualising a steak or with an old fashioned clothes peg on your nose. Thats why its essential to have herbs, spices (including curry), dried onion (if you can), some vegetable stock, tubes of tomato puree, sweeteners and the like in stock so that life can be enjoyable when you are screwed.
I suppose that its as a result of having done without in the past for many reasons, many of which were my fault and many of which were not, that I have to keep my mind focused on short ish term times without. Also, if you need to save up for the next shiny toy, going back to "trial runs" can save you a bit and that can be useful.
On another note, today I experimented with a new Mylk recipe ("Mylk" is the spelling of "milk" amongst one of the online American dairy free crowds who makes their own so as to differentiate it from normal cows milk. So, I thought I would steal the word!) in my soy milk maker. Soy beans plus chick peas plus sunflower seeds. The sunflower seemed to add extra body and a lovely after taste to the milk that gives it a real something. Having that fresh, hot and sweetened with stevia was just as satisfying as I remember that a normal full fat milk used to be in the evenings before bed. And, delightfully cheap by volume too!
IIRC, sunflower seed is a high fat food, so maybe that has given the mylk the fat it lacks? Some add small quantities of coconut oil to their mylks to give it extra full fattedness, but after the sunflower experiment, I don't think that will be all that necessary.
next step is to try it cold to cool my porridge down just like we used to use cows milk in the days when I partook of it.
Drinking the whole 3 X 500 ml jars throughout a day would probably contribute nicely to my caloric in take as well as all macro-nutrients plus fibre. Probably pretty slim on most micro-nutrients though.
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- pickled cukes are a lot more popular here with them being in the Polish shops - my elderly mum remembers them from her childhood, its sort of given her a new lease of life food-wise.
