Monday, February 27, 2006

Hot Cup O' Zhou

I could live on Thai "zhou". No problem. Mind you, it's not the sort of dish that springs to mind when imagining Thai food, but it's my favorite. Think of a chicken-and-rice flavored porridge and you'll have a good idea of what I'm talking about. It's not unlike a Chinese dish of roughly the same name. Unfortunately, zhou is not so easy to come by. Imagine going to a restaurant in the States and ordering cream of wheat or PB&J.

So far I've only been able to get my fix through friends, usually in a "home cooking" setting. My attempts to get the recipe have been frustrated time and again, usually with a curt, "You want, I make for you." That's fine, but I'm just wondering how many bowls of this stuff might constitute common law marriage.

Addendum (3/22): Oh, it's called jog (long o), not zhou. And the preparation is more involved than I imagined: traditional receipes call for the rice to be boiled overnight.