The Soup Queen

I caught an interesting cooking show on TV last night. On Astro's Asian Food Channel (Channel 703), I watched a show on TCM. It was a Taiwanese programme where the host and hostess spoke in Mandarin and sometimes a smattering of Taiwan Hokkien. The show featured 3 recipes each segment, using TCM herbs with the herbalist host explaining about the uses of the specific herbs. Then the lady hostess would cook up a dish, usually a main course, using the herbs. While I am not very interested in making dishes like prawn balls with Chinese herbs (it seemed just too much work!), I liked the 2 other recipes they showed. One was a milk beverage with herbs (I can't recall what now). But the other one was easy. A tong sum and red date tea. Tong sum or dang shen is a mild herb which resembles a dry, gnarled twig the size of a finger. It is called the poor man's ginseng in some instances because it shares similar properties with the more expensive ginseng. Dang shen is actually a root wh...

I've written about using fresh wai san in porridge , thanks to the recipe passed on to me by my regular vegetable-seller in the Lip Sin wet market. A couple of weeks ago, I chanced upon fresh wai san again in the market and bought it for cooking porridge. But the wai san was huge, so I used up only half. The vegetable-seller told me I could keep the other half of the wai san in the fridge for a week or so, provided I wrapped it up in newspaper. One of those days while rummaging through my fridge for something to cook, I saw the wai san again and this time decided to try it in a soup. I had read somewhere (forgotten where now...tsk tsk, must be old age) that it is good as a soup too. The recipe is simple (ah, I am a big proponent of simple recipes, ya) and just needs 3 major ingredients: freshly peeled and sliced wai san, 4-6 de-seeded dried red dates and about 400 gm of pork ribs, blanched. As usual, bring a pot of water to boil. Put all 3 ingredients into pot; bring to a rolling b...

This is one of my favourite blood tonics! I have grown up with this herb because my mom used to boil dong quai for my sisters and me especially when our menses are over. Mom used to emphasise that women benefit most from this herbal soup/tonic. Now that I've married and left home, I still make this dong quai tonic for myself each month. Not many people like the smell of dong quai - but I do. The smell of dong quai simmering in the slow cooker for a few hours is out of this world. Again, I am one of the many odd ones out. Many people I know will run at the smell of chinese herbs but not me. I enjoy going into Chinese medicine shops, and the smell of herbs is divine! Dong quai is really a woman's herb because it helps to correct women's problems such as painful periods, irregular periods, PMS, hormonal imbalance, anaemia, fatigue, high blood pressure, postpartum conditions and menopausal symptoms. If you're a woman and feeling blah most of the time, you should ...

This week I am going to talk about a Traditional Chinese Herb in the form of a root. We Cantonese call it “wai san” but it is also known as “shan yao ”. It is a root that is used in Traditional Chinese Medicine – dried white slices which are added to soups. It is also called Chinese yam, Japanese mountain yam and Korean yam ( Radix Dioscoreae Oppositae ) . The wai san that I usually know is in the form of dried slices which is not very tasty even though it has been boiled and simmered in soups. When I was in the wet market, I chanced upon the fresh version of wai san when I asked my vegetables-seller what this funny-looking root was. Here’s a little bit about this humble herb which actually is very good for the body. Wai san is an anti-ageing herb (that should be enough to get you scrambling to your nearest wet market in search of this root) and is particularly beneficial for the stomach, spleen and lungs. According to Alternative Healing http: //al ternativehealing.org/huai_...