TRAVELS (and more) WITH CECILIA BRAINARD: Cooking with Cecilia

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Cooking with Cecilia - Chicken Soup for my Bad Cold

Cooking with Cecilia - Chicken Soup for my Bad Cold

I have a bad cold. The other night I started wheezing, and I thought I had an allergic reaction to something. I took care of the asthma, but then my throat started feeling raw and swollen and I have this deep ugly cough. I have no fever so this couldn't be the flu. I've been going through my mind where I might have picked up this cold, but I can't come up with any suspect. I've been in so many stores and in the post office, so there's simply no telling who gave this to me.

So here I sit, feeling lousy and thinking of ways to get rid of this cold. I'm doing the salt water rinse; I've slathered Vicks VapoRub on my temples, neck, and chest. I'm drinking a lot of fluids. Aside from my asthma medicine, I haven't taken any medicine.

I'm thinking of cooking chicken soup, more specifically Arroz Caldo, also known as Congee. When I was a child, this was something given to me when I was sick. Even the thought of this rice soup is comforting.

Before I leave my computer for my kitchen, I'm sharing the recipe. Wish me a speedy recovery!

ARROZ CALDO or CONGEE

Ingredients
1 small chicken cut into serving pieces
1 inch ginger, cut into strips
1 head garlic, macerated
1 onion, sliced thinly
2 tbsp oil
3 tbsp fish sauce
1 1/2 c rice
6-8 c water
2 spring onions, thinly sliced for ganish
3 calamansi or 1 lime
3 hard-boiled eggs for garnish
Chicken stock if needed to thin out porridge.

Saute garlic in hot oil until brown. Reserve half of the garlic for garnish. Add the onion and ginger
Add the rest of the ingredients and cook simmering; stir once in a while.
When meat is tender and rice is cooked, serve with green onion leaves and fried garlic. Add hard-boiled eggs for garnish. Serve calamansi and fish sauce on the side.

If the porridge is too thick, you can thin out by adding some chicken stock.

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's official website is ceciliabrainarddotcom. She is the award-winning author and editor of 22 books, including When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, The Newspaper Widow, Magdalena, Selected Stories, Vigan and Other Stories, and more. She edited Growing Up Filipino 1, 2, & 3, Fiction by Filipinos in America, Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America, and other books.. Her work has been translated into Finnish and Turkish; and many of her stories and articles have been widely anthologized. Cecilia has received many awards, including a California Arts Council Fellowship in Fiction, a Brody Arts Fund Award, a Special Recognition Award for her work dealing with Asian American youths, as well as a Certificate of Recognition from the California State Senate, 21st District, and the Outstanding Individual Award from her birth city, Cebu, Philippines. She has lectured and performed at UCLA, USC, University of Connecticut, University of the Philippines, PEN, Shakespeare & Company in Paris, and many others. She has served in the Board of literary arts groups such as PEN, PAWWA (Pacific Asian American Writers West), among others.