Vegetarian-Style Congee (Xi-fan)

Xi-fan, meaning ‘watery rice’, is a simple concoction of rice cooked in a lot of water, otherwise known as congee. You can have an array of ingredients from seafood to a vegetarian mix. As a child, whenever I stayed with my grandparents, we would have a big bowl of Xi-fan (the plain variety) for breakfast accompanied with small dishes of pickled cucumber, spicy pickled bamboo shoots, salted peanuts, fried eggs, and fermented dofu (tofu). My grandparents ate very simply and being farmers wer