Chinese Breakfast

It started here...

"Chinese Breakfast" is what Martha and I call it.  This is not in any way intended to be an authoritative introduction to what folks there eat for their first meal.

Martha and I have traveled to China twice.  The first was in June of 2000 to meet and bring home our daughter, and oldest child, Lily.  Food memories are scarce from that trip.  The second was in June of 2014 as a family of four with son Owen in tow.  This was an organized tour whose priorities included some attention to food.  Some of our meals would have rightly been called feasts.

Owen & Lily (right) feasting.

The experience that changed meals at home, was breakfast. Several of the hotels we stayed at would organize breakfast buffets with a ridiculous variety of choices.  They had a Western table with pastries, cereals, an omelette station, sausage, bacon, pancakes, etc.  And then there was the Eastern region.  I suppose it could have been further subdivided into Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.  There you could find eggs in a couple different formats, but also an array of cooked vegetables, and a congee station with an assortment of condiments.  There was also a noodle soup station with mix-in choices. Here and there were pans of unknown, as yet unidentified foods. I needed a guide.  Maybe the fruit table was situated between East and West.  This arrangement suited our family - kids breakfasted in the West, adults in the East, and we shared the fruit table.

I'm no authority on congee.  It's a rice porridge made with chicken or vegetable broth, salt, and maybe some ginger.  It was present at every Chinese hotel breakfast buffet, and the first couple times I tried it (on that first trip to meet Lily), my reaction was, "Interesting, but bland."  What I didn't realize at the time (I can plead distraction) is that this is what a Chinese person might say tasting a bowl of oatmeal with nothing on it.  It's the condiments, stupid.

At some point on that last trip, early enough to benefit from it, I watched an Asian woman prepare her bowl of congee.  In went a tablespoon of roasted peanuts, a dollop of mysterious green paste that turned out to be "preserved" (fermented and canned) mustard greens, and a dash of soy sauce.  I copied her, and it was really, really good.  Creamy rice porridge, crunchy peanuts, salty/sour vegetable, umami soy...  Not flavors that would typically be comfortable in an American mouth at 7:00 AM, but my eyes had been opened. 

Congee, with a second cup of coffee.

We also came to appreciate eggs surrounded by cooked vegetables.  There's not a whole lot more to be said about that other than it's appealing to someone who knows their enemies include sugar and flour.  It also fits into the notion that there may be something to this whole gut flora thing.

Not too long after returning home I took on the congee project.  I made a batch that was pretty damn close, and I bought a jar of "preserved vegetable" at the Asian grocery that out of sheer luck turned out to be the right thing.  Add peanuts and soy and in the end I felt I had a better-than-decent batch of breakfast congee in my own kitchen.  My family didn't share my enthusiasm, and in all honesty it wasn't something I wanted to have the next day, and the day after.  So there's the rub - unless you really want to have it a few days in a row cooking up a batch of congee doesn't work.  Alas, congee did not find a stable home on our breakfast menu.

But eggs with vegetables did.  "Chinese Beakfast" is on my plate two or three times a week.  I can incorporate leftovers from dinner, or quickly saute a batch of greens on any given morning.  It is a welcome addition for someone who knows their enemies and ponders their gut.  And my kids can breakfast in the West.

Plain omelette, collard greens, kimchee.

Summer squash, tomato, garlic, onion - Italian-Chinese.