I promised myself I'd finish some of the leftovers in my fridge today, so even though I was feeling under the weather I forced myself to come home and cook. Besides, I knew a simple home cooked meal would make me feel much better than anything in a restaurant, and it wouldn't require talking to people. Not in a people mood. Not at all.I cooked some rice, set a small pot of water on simmer with a lot of sliced ginger, washed some baby bok choy, and stir fried the vegetables with some ginger and leftover pan fried catfish. It looked good and smelled fine, but I didn't want to eat it. Looking at it sitting in the wok left me feeling bored and uninspired. So I covered it and took a two hour nap. When I went back to the kitchen, I realized that what I wanted was fried rice. I heated the fish and vegetables back up, picked out the ginger, added the rice with a splash of soy sauce, and scrambled an egg into it. Suddenly I had a meal I wanted to eat.
Confession: I compulsively mash food together. I'm the one you don't want to share Chinese shaved ice with because I'll mush it all together before digging in. I'm the one who stirs her oatmeal a hundred times even though it's already a homogenous mass. I don't know that I think all this mushing makes things taste better; I just can't control myself. I usually catch myself stirring gravy into mashed potatoes and have to force myself to stop because even I don't think it tastes better that way. So yes, mashing all the food into one plate somehow comforted me and made the whole thing easier to eat.
To explain the ginger water: ginger tea! A must when one's feeling down. All you do is simmer the heck out of some slices of ginger, then add sugar (I like brown or rock sugar). It's better to make the ginger tea too strong and add water later rather than to make listless ginger tea and have to boil it way down to get flavor. The tea also tastes better after it's had some time to mellow. I like to simmer for half an hour, let it cool down, then reheat.
So comforting. I feel almost as good as new.
2 comments:
Not that my mother would ever share shaved ice, but if she had to, it would not be with you. I got better but I never got as good as she did - finishing all that ice like that...yeesh!
Ha. You can hypothesize all you want about what "might happen" or "would happen" if your mom had to share a dessert with me, but there's no way I'll ever be crazy enough to get between yo mama and her dessert.
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