Cháo gà

Viet: Cháo gà

English: Rice soup with chicken

Pronunciation: Jow (Jelly minus elly plus pow minus p.), rising tone. Yapple minus pple, falling tone. Jow Ya.

My poor little Asian got sick.  (Can I call a 6'2" man little?) 

Headache, vomiting, fatigue, the usual works that keep you out of work for two days.  I went home early to morph into Nurse Sarah.  I made him comfortable in bed, got him a glass of water, and then asked what I could make him to eat.  Any suggestion of food made him cringe.  But there was one culinary risk he was willing to take.  Whenever he was sick as a child, his mom would always make him cháo.  And since sickness makes one revert to a childlike state, he now requested that I make him the same dish.

Facts known: 

Called "Jow."

Made in rice maker but with more water. 

Soup-like.

A wonderful invention called the "internet" enabled me to expand on these facts.  What Thai calls "Cháo" is called "congee" in many Asian countries, and every Asian country has their own variation.   The Vietnamese version is often made with chicken, or "gà" as I should say.  The big debate is how much water to put into the rice cooker.  Once I decided upon 5 cups, though, I still wasn't satisfied.  

Rice and water and chicken? I decided to "Viet it up" a bit.  Toss in some fresh green onions, sprinkle in some ground ginger, mix in a little soy sauce.  Just because he's sick doesn't mean I halt my obsessive desire to appeal to the Viet child inside him!

And let me tell what that little Viet child said, peeking out through big brown eyes.  He slurped and Mmmm'd and devoured.  And somewhere in the middle of that, he said, and I quote, "It's better than what I had as a kid!"

My response was of course a victory dance.

Make way for the Vietnamese chef, world.

Cháo gà, made for sick Thai

1 cup of rice

5 cups of water

4 green onion stalks

Fully cooked chicken breast fajitas

ground ginger

soy sauce

black pepper

1. Put rice and water in rice cooker.  Turn to Cook.  Monitor while cooking to make sure doesn't overflow.  If that happens, lift the lid and let the dragon calm down.

2. Heat up desired amount of chicken breasts in microwave according to directions (or this is the point where you could be more legit and cook up fresh chicken breasts.  I'm vegetarian, so I'm not very passionate about the meat.)

3. Chop green onion stalks (not the bulb part) so there about 1/4 thick.

4. Cut warmed (Warning! Could be very hot!) chicken into little squares, about 1/2 inch thick.

5. When the rice is done, mix in the green onions.  

6. Add ginger, pepper, and soy sauce to taste.  Ginger can be very powerful so be careful with that one!

7. Put chicken want in 1 serving in bowl.  Scoop cháo into bowl.  Make sure you get a good amount of water too, not just the rice.  

Future servings, I had to add in more water and heat it up in the microwave, especially as I neared the bottom of the cooker.  I put the chicken in the serving bowl here because I'm vegetarian-- I wanted some cháo too!  But you can of course mix it into the main pot.

Good news: Thai is now all better.  Coincidence?

First attempts at Viet cooking

I decided to make my first dive into Viet cooking.  I found two recipes online that claimed to be Vietnamese.  This is their story.

Viet Food Attempt #1

Original Recipe: Vietnamese Salt and Pepper Eggplant

Source: RecipeZaar.com

Evolved Into: Might-Be-Viet Ginger & Pepper Eggplant Fries

Viet: cà tím

English: Eggplant
Pronunciation: gah (low) theme (rising)

Pronunciation Confusion:  Forward accent indicates a high, rising tone. Cá means fish. Tím means purple.  Backward accent indicates low sound. Cà is the first part of eggplant. Tìm mean search. 

cơm

Viet: cơm
Meaning: cooked rice
Pronunciation: a mix between "gum" and "scum" minus s

The Asian staple.  I have eaten more rice in the last four and a half years then I think I ate in the whole eighteen years before I met my fiance.  He eats it with Chinese sausage, with canned tuna, with barbeque, with any meat he can dig out of our fridge.  And always drowned in Golden Mountain Seasoning Sauce, which I only recently realized is soy sauce (the Vietnamese literally translates to "salt to increase taste"). 

In the beginning, Thai always made the rice.  He'd scoop the dry grains out of the giant cloth bag in the pantry, and they'd clatter into the silver bowl of the rice cooker.  He'd casually hold the bowl under the faucet for a few seconds, before fitting in back in its nest.  And 20 minutes later, voila! Delicious white rice!  I was in awe of this magic machine that combined dry and wet with heat to create perfection.

Then, Thai graced me with the darkest and deepest Vietnamese secret to be passed down for generations... (do they even have rice cookers in Vietnam?)... The key was the amount of water.  Too little and the rice couldn't cook; too much and it turned into mush.  The perfect amount, he instructed me, was to the first knuckle of your pinky finger.  And thus I took my first step forward as a Viet chef.


------ Note: There are three versions of the letter O in the Viet alphabet.  Yes, three!!   Let's see if I get these right -- o is said like "aww," ơ is said like "uh," and ô is said like "oh." -- Now just throw in the accents and there are only seventeen possible combinations for the letter O!  Oh my...