Jook (Rice Porridge): Comfort Food for Her Spouse

I'm very grateful to my hospice volunteer experience.  It was a calling to become the first Cantonese speaking volunteer at Hospice.  I never expected to be serving the dying and their families at that point in my life.

I was assigned to patient A; hospice asked me to go and provide companionship.  I arrived at her apartment and discovered that her spouse needed the companionship more.  He was her caregiver and was trapped in the house all day to care for her.  She was on morphine to reduce her pain, but the morphine also made her very sedated.  He was losing her, he was lonely, and he was grieving.

I served this family for a few months.  The day she was actively dying, I visited her to say my good-bye.  Importantly, it was time to say my good-bye to her spouse.  I brought along with me a container of homemade jook for him that visit.

Jook, it's a comfort food in the Cantonese culture.  It is also called congee or rice porridge.  I grew up eating jook for breakfast.  Everytime someone is sick in the family, the first thing we do is to make jook.  If someone is grieving, we also make jook because we know it's hard for them to intake solid food.  So jook provides comfort and something easy for them to eat.

There are many methods to make jook.

One simple and lazy way is to use a slow cooker.

1 cup of rice
5 cups of water
5 small dried scallops
1 to 2 sticks of dried bean curd


Wash the rice, dried scallops and dried bean curd
Break the dried scallops and dried bean curd into pieces
Put everything in the slow cooker
Set high for 8 hours
Add salt for flavor when ready to serve

I usually do this before I sleep and jook is ready in the morning

You can substitute the dried scallops and dried bean curd to other items or you can remove these items and make plain jook.  However, this was the jook I made for my patient's spouse when I said my good-byes.