Watery ricefor the upset tummy

I'm always told that if you have an upset tummy to stick to the BRAT diet. That is banana, rice, applesauce and toast. However, when I had an upset tummy growing up, my mom would make me the Chinese version of porridge. Basically, watery rice. Plain watery rice is best, but if the tummy can take it, you can a few things to make it taste more palatable.

First of all, you can cook it with some salt, but I prefer to use soy sauce. From there, you can add grated ginger and maybe just a drop of sesame oil. Ginger is great for tummies and is very effective against nausea. Hubby hates it when I make him ginger tea for his upset tummy. It's very hard to get him to drink much of it at all. I have to coax and cajole him into take mere sips and honestly, it's not that bad! I add sugar to make more palatable and even still, he fights me all the way!

Anyways, if you just love watery rice, you can go crazy and cook it with various kinds of ground meat and veggies. My favorite combination right now is preserved eggs, salted eggs, scallion, ginger and sesame oil. Just chop everything up and dump it into the container with the rice and water and then cook in a rice cooker. I don't know how to cook rice on a stove, actually. I only know how to use a rice cooker. Hubby doesn't know how to use a rice cooker but knows how to cook rice on a stove.

Allow me to go off on a tangent here and sing some praises to my rice cooker. I LOVE my rice cooker! It cooks via steam, so I never need a stovetop steamer unless it's for big stuff. My rice cooker is very small. Anyways, it can also make delicious steam cakes (think Malay cakes), hard boiled eggs, soups and keeps things warm. Wanna make a large batch of tea eggs? Cook eggs in a rice cooker first and then crack the shells and cook again in your tea egg solution. Voila! Easy peasy tea eggs! Store the batch in the fridge in the tea egg solution and snack on it over the course of a week or so.

Anyways, going back to watery rice. This stuff can be as simple and plain as you like, or packed full of meats and veggies and flavors. It is fairly common to just add soy sauce and sesame oil and stir in some mashed fermented tofu (hubby is not a fan of this, but he doesn't know that I sometimes put it in his ramen). Growing up, my mom always made it plain, but served it with Chinese pickled cucumbers and pork sung (I think this is dried shredded pork). There was no added soy sauce or oils and this was just fine for us. Unfortunately, I avoid the pickled cucumbers now because a lot of brands have preservatives and MSG, and the pork sung is, well meat, and is really unhealthy.

That gets me thinking, maybe I should make my own pickled cucumbers...