The Soup Queen

You would have seen this in most Chinese shops. It's a packet of dried ingredients made up of roots and twigs. Actually it is sugar cane. Dried sugar cane with an assortment of ingredients to make a cooling herbal tea. It's called Cane & Arrow Root Stock.  The package contains 3 ingredients (see photo below) - sugar cane, carrot and arrow root .  All you have to do is put the contents of this packet into a pot of water, say 1 liter. Boil on low fire for 20 minutes. Then add rock sugar to taste. It's a traditional herbal tea for cooling down the body on hot summer days!  Arrow root is the white slices, the carrot is the amber coloured stuff on the top while the rest are just sugar cane. What's your favourite herbal tea? 

Here are some new type of fruits I bought in the supermarket the other day. They're called Chinese Winter Dates. I didn't know much about them until a friend told me they're lovely and crunchy. When I saw them in the supermarket, I decided I ought to try them out.  Here's how they look like. Don't look very appealing right? All yellow and brown. They're mildly sweet and crunchy though. Like an apple. This is how it looks on the inside. The flesh is white with a seed in the middle.  Actually they're dates.  Like the regular dried red dates.  It's just that these are fresh dates which have yet to wrinkle up and dry out.  They're mostly from Shandong and available from October to December (hence their "winter" status). It's supposed to be the "rarest fruit in the world" but don't take it too seriously. I think Chinese exporters tend to make big claims.  There's very little inf...

Wai san plant that I grew from fresh wai san  This is a wai san plant. I didn't even know I could grow them here in Malaysia. And I grew them by accident! ( Wrote about them a while back too). Below is a fresh wai san tuber. I've always bought this in my Lip Sin market. Used it for soups . Fresh wai san root  Fresh wai san tuber can keep for a few weeks in the fridge. Just make sure you wrap it in some newspaper and put it into a plastic bag. Sometimes though I forget I have wai san. After a month or so, I get icky about using the old wai san lying about in my fridge. As you know I never throw organic stuff that's edible away. I just turn them into compost. So I chucked the old wai san into my compost pot. I figured it will disintegrate and become compost after a month or so. But imagine my surprise when I started digging up the compost. The wai san was alive and growing! It sprouted new roots. I was feeling adventurous so I decided to give...

The soup for making your hair dark, lustrous and beautiful  Hey there. I have been missing for a bit. But I miss my blog too. Today I am going to share a new recipe but I am not too sure if I've shared this before. Doesn't matter right? I have been intrigued by foods and ingredients that are black. With my white hairs popping out, I have been on a journey to find foods that prevent hair from greying (actually I have not seen grey hair but I have seen lots of white hair). Pan-fried dried black beans in their split skins I hate pulling out my white hair by its roots but somehow I do it. Some folks say that pulling out your white hair encourages more white hair to grow. Bah. I don't care. My current fave - super large sized dried red dates  I have also been using henna powder to dye my hair. That's a lot better than waiting for chemicals to seep into my brain when I go to my hair stylist's. I sit there with the stuff on my head for 4...