Hot food for a cold day

It's been pouring since Sunday. With any luck, we might get a typhoon 8 signal sooner than July!!!! Which just means a free day huddled at home with company and home cooked meals.. sounds like a great plan. (I obviously don't work in retail!)

Anyway, cold and wet days like these cry out for comfort food. And nothing brings more comfort than hot and sour sichuan soup and steaming hot claypot rice.



The best part of claypot rice (a rather ubiquitous dish in HK) is of course the end - scrapping off the burnt rice bits off the bottom of the pot. A nice toasted crunchiness that adds special bite to this dish. They even have a special name for that part of the dish. It's called guoba in mandarin (literally, pot scar). I've even seen some Chinese restaurants feature guoba dishes, making full use of the roasted flavour in soup and gravy based dish offsprings. It's really a little known delicacy.

I can just see my mum screaming, "DON"T EAT THE BLACK BITS!!! WILL GET CANCER!!!".. and dig in anyway!

As for sichuan hot and sour soup, it's one of those things that you'd think is a lot of work to make but is really quite easy to whisk out. And it's totally customisable to your 'texture' preference: If you like a 'crunchy' soup, use carrots, bamboo shoots, beans sprout, preserved vegetable, black fungus, green peas etc..., for a more smooth soup, use soft bean curd, eggs, shredded chicken, mushrooms etc..

Plus it's the perfect dish for pack rats like Tara and myself, who hoard all sorts of food bits and ends as it calls for just a small helping of everything.

The recipes are pretty long and I wish I knew how to post them in a different window... Will do this later...