Today, I made rice porridge with my mom for lunch. Unlike our regular white rice soup, this one was quite colorful and tasted much better.

First, we rinsed out a cup of white, long-grain rice. Then, we added a few cups of water and set it aside to boil on the stove. We proceeded to slice up the green onions and the ginger, using only the most colorful parts. This would make the soup visually appealing while flavoring it and getting rid of the bad aftertaste of the meat.

The ground pork had to be marinated to make it tasty. We did this by adding water, salt, sugar, a bit of vinegar, chopped-up green onions, and my favorite flavoring agent — Chinese cooking wine.

After we stirred it and set it aside to marinate, we started to dice the duck eggs. If you’ve never seen a duck egg, it has a gray and black-speckled shell. Inside, its white is solid and is translucently brownish-black. The yolk is also solid, though a bit gooier, and is a gray-green shade of teal. This was by far the most difficult item I’ve ever had to dice, as it was slippery and kept sticking to my knife, so I had to dip my knife into a cup of water every so often and cut it in my hand without slicing off a finger or four. I doubt that my boiled finger would taste too good.

Then, once the rice was boiling for a while, but not yet cooked, we added the ginger, followed by the duck eggs, which were now in tiny pieces. Alternately stirring the concoction and putting the lid back on, I was reminded of other similar soups that I had eaten in various restaurants, such as at Eastern Taste in Savoy. The soup they offered looked more or less the same, but had more soup and rice than green onions or pork. So much less appetizing.

Reminded of the soup when I almost burned a finger, we lifted the lid of the porridge and my mother started adding in tiny increments of meat while I stirred. We couldn’t add the entire bowl of meat at the same time, or we’d have one giant undercooked meatball. But we also couldn’t add two molecules of meat in at a time, since a) that was impossible with our culinary equipment; and b) it would take so long that either the soup would burn or I would die of hunger. Neither of which I was particularly in favor of.

At long last — er, about half an hour — I finally got to taste the soup. Delicious! There’s just a really delicate taste that is only available in this kind of rice porridge — a hint of duck egg, a dose of green onion, a bit of Chinese cooking wine, a taste of ginger, and a morsel of salt. Now if you’ll excuse me, my porridge is getting cold.