Easy, Tasty Chinese Porridge

This is one of my mum-in-law's secret to a smooth porridge. Put some salt and oil into the rice and marinate it overnight. The oil will help to break down the porridge and cause it to cook faster. For me, I alway forgot to marinate the rice overnight, so I just marinate it like 10 minutes before I cook and I omit the salt, it still works.

Here's the porridge recipe:
* A small piece of meat (can be chicken, pork or beef)
* 3 cups of water
* 1/4 cup of rice, marinated as above
* 1 tablespoon of puree vegetables (can be any vegetable you want, I normally put cai xin, spinach or kai lan) or you can put 1/4 piece of carrots or 2 or 3 broccoli foret or both

1. Wash and marinate rice with a little oil, just enough to slightly coat it, you can wash away the oil with water if you want to.
2. Scale the meat (basically, boil it in hot water to remove the blood).
3.Put rice and meat in a slow cooker and pour in 3 cups of hot boiling water. Then let the rice slowly cook for 2 hours or more. Then remove the meat.
4. Put in the puree vegetables, switch off the slow cooker and let the porridge stand for about 15 min. Served hot.

* To increase the nutritional value, I normally throw in a small piece of fish meat together with the puree vegetable. The heat of the porridge will cook the fish.
* I sometime used stock instead of the meat and water. I will cook a big pot of stock using pig bone, chicken carcass, fish bone and some carrots and ginger. I will then pour the stock into containers and freeze it. Then when I need the stock, I just hit it up and pour it into the marinated rice.

Weaning Baby FAN

Baby FAN seams to be drinking less and less milk nowadays as she got so easily distracted by everything, his brother, the environment etc.... So, I started her on solid food when she hit 4 months old. Started her on commercially bought rice gruel but she doesn't seems to like it and will scream whenever I serve it to her. So, I tried serving her some warm porridge that I cooked for SMALL FAN and she loves it. Now, at 5 months, she took 2 porridge meals per day, each meal about 3 tablespoons...cool right. Check out my easy and tasty porridge recipe under my review section.

I have given up on introducing her to a milk bottle and am trying out giving her milk in a sippy cup. Today, I manage to serve her 1 oz of milk from the cup, although I think half of it flowing out from her mouth, but she seems to be more willing to drink from the cup. Am planning to serve her milk from the sippy cup inbetween each milk feed and see if I can slowly increase the amount of milk served and slowly wean her off my breast.