The Soup Queen

This is a super easy soup for days when I have no herbs in my fridge. All you need are 4 vegetables that you can easily buy from the market or supermarket - burdock, radish (with the green tops), corn and carrot. You don't need to use all of the burdock which also goes by the name of gobo. Burdock is a long, dark brown root and you can use one foot of the root. The rest can cut up and kept in a zip lock bag in the vegetables section of your fridge. Slice burdock into small chunks.  For the daikon, just peel off the skin and chop up everything including the green leafy tops into chunks.  Break the corn up into 3 sections. Peel the carrot and chop into small chunks.  Into a large pot, put in 1.5 liters of water. Bring to boil. Add in blanched pork bones or half a chicken, with bones. Add in all these chopped up vegetables and bring to a rolling boil again. Once the soup is boiling briskly, cover the pot. Lower the fire to the smallest flame...

This is a chinese style pumpkin soup with a medley of vegetables such as carrot, leek and button mushroom making it truly healthy. This combination of vegetables are also good for nourishing weak lungs. You will need: 2 fairly large carrots, cut into chunks some pumpkin, cut into chunks, skin removed some leek 1/2 can button mushrooms lean pork (scald pork) 2 slices ginger Put all the above ingredients into a pot of boiling water. Boil furiously for 10 minutes. Lower heat and simmer for 2 hours. Before serving, season with salt.

This is a soup I made today while digging about my fridge. I found some corn on the cob, some lotus root, a handful of soyabeans and half a carrot. I decided to make it a full vegetarian soup because I knew soya beans would provide the sweetness desired, in fact, carrot and lotus and corn already are 'sweet' vegetables. So I put them all together in a pot of water and brought the whole thing to a boil. Put on the lid and turned down the heat so the soup was just simmering. Simmer for 2 hours and season with salt and pepper. How did it taste? Very light, very sweet and very clear on the palate. The type of soup that one should drink in this scorching heat. Penang is very hot in the day time and I can feel the heat so here's more reason to drink soup. Also, when the day heats up and I don't feel like taking much food, soup comes to the rescue. Try this soup and let me know how it goes. For variation, you can add some chicken thighs to the soup (but do remove the chicken ...

I'm a big fan of watercress because it makes for a delightfully delicious soup. Watercress is big on nutrients too but usually I make the carnivore version - watercress soup with chicken or with pork. This time though I tried a vegetarian version of watercress soup. I was inspired to cook this soup as I've been visiting Than Hsiang Temple almost weekly now for my vegetarian lunch (one of my resolutions this year is to eat less meat and more veg - not that I am a big meat-eater. I just want to do my part for the environment). I salute those who are vegetarian because it's not easy, well for me at least. I still love fish too much! So yeah, I made a pot of watercress soup today. And it's suitable for vegetarians. You need only 3 ingredients: 1 bunch of fresh watercress (pluck leaves and wash. Do not throw away the hard stems. This will go into the soup too. It'll be too wasteful to throw out the stems when they can add flavour to the soup.You don't have to eat the...