The Soup Queen

I got this recipe from a Taiwanese TV show on traditional chinese herbs. It looks easy enough to prepare. In a pot, bring 500 ml of water to boil. Add dang shen and red dates. Simmer for 20 minutes. Serve warm. This tea helps to boost the immune system. Dang Shen or Codonopsis Pilosulae is helpful for the spleen and lungs. It's a root similar to that of the ginseng family. It is considered the poor man's ginseng as it is cheap yet full of amazing properties. As it's mild, the whole family can take this herb. According to FoodsnHerbs website, this power root helps: -Build immunity and raise resistance -Promote the production body fluid -Nourish blood and energy -Lower blood pressure -Raise blood sugar -Tonify spleen and lung energy Dang Shen is also suited for people suffering from chronic fatigue, hypertension, loss of appetite, loose bowels, pale complexion, exhaustion after surgery or childbirth, body bloating and facial swelling due to edema, immune deficiency and hypo...

Everyone has this idea that Gui Ling Gao, a Chinese herbal jelly , is made from Tortoise Shell. I think it used to contain tortoise shell scrapings but no longer. I bet it must be tough finding people who would ingest anything made out of the poor chelonian. I made some Gui Ling Gao today with a premix powder I bought from Eu Yan Sang. The packet priced at RM 10 consisted of 2 smaller packets (so it's actually RM 5 per pack). From RM 5 worth, I could make 14 small cups of gui ling gao, which would last me a whole week! (Normally I would buy readymade Gui Ling Gao at RM 2 for a small plastic container but I love to experiment so I thought I should be able to make some on my own. Plus it's cheaper too.) This herbal jelly has a bitter taste but it is recommended for teens as it helps clear acne (and most women too as it enhances the complexion). Gui Ling Gao is served chilled and as a dessert after a heavy meal. As it clears heat, it is a cooling dessert and pregnant women are not...

This is yet another herb soup packet mix which I got from Eu Yan Sang. Ning Shen Soup is a traditional Chinese soup recipe for calming the mind and keeping the heart healthy. Its ingredients are: radix astragali rhizoma dioscareae rhizoma polygonati odorati pericarpium citri reticulatae bulbus lilii arilllus longan fructus lycii If the above sounds like gibberish to you, it actually isn't. Of course it sounds like a bunch of sophisticated herbs but really, they're normal Chinese herbs. radix astragali -- Huang Qi or Milk Vetch Root rhizoma dioscareae -- Chinese yam or shanyao rhizoma polygonati odorati -- Solomon's seal pericarpium citri reticulatae -- dried tangerine peel bulbus lilii -- dried lily bulb arilllus longan -- dried longan fructus lycii -- wolfberry The herbs are clean so a quick rinse was just about it. Next I brought a pot of water (1.5 liters) to boil. Once the water was bubbling, I added in the Ning Shen herbs and blanched pork bones. Boil on high for 10...

I bought a packet of Five Flower Tea (comprising 2 sachets) from Eu Yan Sang for my mom-in-law not too long ago but she only kept 1 sachet and gave the other sachet back to me. I think older people do not dare to drink too much of these cooling teas...something I should have remembered when I bought this tea! But one learns! I've become a fan of Eu Yan Sang of late, possibly because I visit Jusco in Queensbay Mall so often. I am the mad sort, the type who loves the smell and fragrance of herbs in a TCM shop and that's what Eu Yan Sang/EYS is. And perhaps the great thing is, I can ask for the herb in English and the staff knows what I am talking about. But EYS is also a modern shop which means a lot of the herbs are packed hygenically. Of course the prices at EYS is much higher than my regular TCM stall inside the Lip Sin market BUT the herbs really do look better - they don't look too dried up! One of those things I would spend on is food and herbs are food and I s...

Madam Chin is my grandmother who is touching 91. She's my dad's mom and a mother to 9 children. One of the best recipes come from my grandma. She cooks the best stuffed crabs, the best braised ikan terubok with black beans and the best soya sauce chicken. In fact, her salted chicken is a family favourite. But she's 91 now and can hardly walk, what more cook. She now spends her time in her room, watching TV, reading magazines and talking to her sons and daughters and grandchildren. My grandma's soya sauce chicken is my life-saver for days when I do not know what to cook or when I get too darn lazy to cook. This recipe is a sure success because the ingredients are easily found in any good kitchen. It's also a dish for children because they will love the soya sauce gravy to bits. It's a foolproof dish that keeps well and one that you will adore for its so easy and quick to prepare. (My husband loves this dish too!) And if someone asks you where you got this recipe,...

Today's recipe is not so much a soup but a drink! And this one comes with its own little story. One day, many moons ago, I was at the Tropical Spice Garden. This was at Teluk Bahang, almost near the end of the tourist hotel strip. My sis, cousin and I decided to lunch there, not knowing what we would find. But adventurous girls that we were, we headed there, despite the oncoming drizzle. It didn't help that my sis and cousin were in 'urban attire' - short skirt, shorts, heels. It was a bit of a climb up to the cafe of the spice garden (which by the way is a must-see for horticulture fans. It's a spice garden so it's full of plants and herbs for the green fan.) I'd been on the spice garden walk years ago so we skipped that. We were there for the grub. Which wasn't much and that itself was a disappointment. The cafe basically served as a snack and beverage corner though the view of the sea off Batu Feringgi was amazing. Imagine, post-rain, the aquamarine s...

It's been raining nonstop the whole of today. And I've been sneezing and having such a running nose! I woke up with a little bit of a sore, parched throat but I quickly drank a warm glass of water mixed with a squeeze of lemon juice and a teaspoon of honey. That seemed to do it but my nose is still red and runny! Yes, even SoupQueen sometimes get the sniffles! That's the main reason I stuff myself with soups. So that I don't get the sniffles and have to down some pills. I was thinking of popping 2 cold pills and going to bed (since it is lovely and cosy to be in bed right about now) but I shall let my body battle the cold the natural way. Maybe my cold is due to the sudden changes in the weather - it is hot and sunny in the morning and suddenly rains nonstop in the evening. The weather changes from warm to cold can be unnerving for my body. Or it could be the KFC which I took for dinner last Tuesday. I was hankering for some fried chicken and thought, time to try out th...

Fruits, especially local fruits like bananas, papayas, dragon fruits (my favourite is the deep ruby red variety) are cheap and plentiful in Banting. That's where I was last week. I went home to visit my parents for a few days and decided to teach my mom a new dessert recipe. I bought an unripe papaya at the Banting Sunday market. My mom chided me saying that it's not palatable. I told her I was going to cook it, instead of waiting for it to ripen. The fruit vendor was smart enough to tell my mom that she knew what I was going to do with the unripe fruit. Hmmm! After I made it, mom took some over to our longtime neighbour, Mrs Chan. Mom told me the unripe papaya tasted a lot like sweet potato after it's been simmered. So here's a green papaya and snow fungus dessert recipe you can try: 1 unripe papaya (a bit green with blushes of orange, signs of going to ripen), cut into bite size chunks 8-10 dried red dates a few pieces of snow fungus, soaked and cut up into smaller p...

I haven't gone missing though I've been quite busy. I was in and out of Penang and doing stuff I wouldn't normally do. You can see what I was busy about if you read this - which is over at my regular blog. Anyway, I am back in Penang already. And super excited because I bought myself a new recipe book on Chinese soups (Cooking with Chinese Herbs: New Edition with 20 Additiional Recipes) by Terry Tan for RM60, a book which I'd been eyeing greedily this year. *grinning like a Cheshire cat* I am glad I waited because I won a book voucher from Popular Bookstore recently and I used that voucher to redeem this book. Did this yesterday when I was on a book browsing spree at Popular Midlands (they're having a book sale of up to 20%). I said spree because I spent close to RM200 buying books and magazines. Now Terry Tan is not a new author. I'd seen his books before and one of his recipe books was published in 1983! Now that's what I call a long time cook and author....

Just got back from one week in Kuching. It was warm over there which is unusual as I always expect rain in Borneo. When it rains in Kuching, it pours. I go back to Kuching for 1 reason - to visit my parents-in-law. So I take it as a break from work. But the thing that gets me truly antsy is that we just have dial-up internet access in his parents' home. Which is horrible. After years on broadband, getting to dial-up is torture. I don't cook when I get to my mom-in-law's. She likes cooking and she has a particular way of cooking to accommodate my father-in-law. I tried once but my efforts were rebuffed. So the SoupQueen gets a total break from the kitchen when she's in Kuching. Anyway, enough of gossip stuff. In the spirit of Sarawak, I am going to teach you how to cook 'kachama' or 'kachangma'. It's a wild grass or herb that's used famously in Sarawak for mothers who are in confinement / just given birth. This dish helps get rid of wind. ...

I bought some fresh cordyceps from the Lip Sin market just last Friday and asked the vegetable lady how to cook it. I remember clearly the last time I cooked this fresh cordyceps - I went to the Chinese herbalist and got a packet of prepacked herbs to add to the fresh cordyceps. It made a lovely soup. This time though I wanted to try something else. My vegetable lady told me that it's also good to boil fresh cordyceps with medlar seeds/wolfberry seeds and honey dates. And I, being the adventurous sort, never say no to a new soup recipe . Yum! Luckily I had some honey dates in my fridge as well as some leftover medlar seeds . (It's good to stock up on herbs - buy a little of everything and store in jars in the fridge. On any good day, I have dang gui, red dates, honey dates, tao ren, medlar seeds and dried longan which I can use to make anything from soup to sweet dessert! It's my stockpile of Chinese herbs... which is very important, well to me anyway!) I also...

Clockwise from top: dried longan, dried lotus seeds and American ginseng slices I was wondering what kind of soup to cook this week when I saw a box of American Ginseng in the fridge. It had been sitting there for almost 2 months now. Usually I will use pre-packed herbs for soups but this time around, none were to be found. So American Ginseng it is. American Ginseng, unlike its cousin, Korean Ginseng, is the best kind of ginseng to brew and drink as it is not cooling nor heaty. Korean Ginseng is very heaty - it is a tonic after all. My 90 year old Grandmother consumes Korean Ginseng to give her strength and warm up her limbs. At the same time, the Korean Ginseng is helping turn her grey hair black - I am not kidding. I saw her with partially black hair and wondered why. Did she dye her hair? My cousin then remarked that her health (and hair) started to improve eversince she started taking Korean ginseng. But if you are of the heaty type (which means you have a heated blood system), do...

I'm bowled over by everyone's comments! I never knew so many people were reading this blog. Starting from this post, I will feature more regular recipes apart from soup recipes. Today, let me share with you a simple chicken recipe. I love eating bitter gourd but not my husband. So if I thinly slice bitter gourd and fry it with egg (as an omelette), the bitterness still lingers. Using the braising method, I find that bitter gourd is more palatable and easier to eat. Its taste is more mild. Bitter gourd is a good vegetable for removing heatiness in the body (which is accumulated if you stay up late or have eaten too much meat or have taken one too many alcoholic drinks). This is a recipe which serves 4 persons well. When I cook this, I cook more so that I can freeze the rest for dinner. It has a touch of gravy so it goes great with rice. Braised Chicken with Bitter gourd 2 chicken thighs, chopped into bite-size OR 6 pairs of chicken wings - drummets included 1 whole bitter gourd,...

Just a quick one: you can now bookmark this blog at www.SoupQueen.net If you type in SoupQueen.net, you will reach this blog of mine on Blogspot. I know many of you probably have bookmarked this site at Blogspot, but a shorter domain name is always preferable. I know how confusing it is to have a long URL! As I run a web design business, I always aim to walk the talk whenever I can. Of course I wanted to get the SoupQueen.com domain but that's already taken up! So what can a soup queen do but buy the next available one, even though it's a .net I know you come to SoupQueen for soup recipes. I'm a big experimenter in the kitchen and always look out for ways to cook tasty, simple and nutritious meals even if it's only for me and my husband. I'm not the type to resort to instant Cintan or Mamee noodles. No way. Cooking for me is also a way to spend time with myself. I can talk to myself while I'm stir-frying vegetables or chopping garlic. It helps me unwind and rela...

OK, OK, I keep going to Than Hsiang Temple for vegetarian meals BUT I also go to check out what vegetarian soups they have. I mean, that's like killing 2 birds with one stone right? On one end, I get to be healthy (by focusing less on meat and more on tofu and greens). On the other, I get some ideas for my vegetarian soup series. Hmmm, what could be better than that? I always thought that soups made purely with vegetables tasted bland. For the longest time, I thought meat/chicken gave soup such robust tastes. They still do but they also can be oily (skim the oil off before you serve) and for non-meat eaters, a definite put-off if they want a vegetarian version. I deduced that any soup made with carrot as its core ingredient will be light, clear and delightfully tasty (I opt out of using 'sweet' but that's how we Cantonese describe a light and tasty soup - it's "sweet". The meaning for "sweet" is very distinct from the "sweet" one gets f...

Here's a super simple recipe to reduce heatiness and prevent colds. I got this recipe from a Taiwanese TV programme today - yes, so it's fresh! This dessert soup is not suitable for people with gastric ulcers or weak stomachs as it contains hawthorn, which can be too acidic. If you are serving this to the elderly folk, you can reduce the amount of hawthorn too. Chrysanthemum Dessert Soup 25 gm honeysuckle or jin yin hua 5 gm licorice 25 gm dried chrysanthemum flowers 15 gm hawthorn 6 bowls of water Place water and all ingredients into pot of water. Simmer closed for 15 minutes on low heat. Serve warm, sweetened with honey. * Honey is also a good remedy for constipation. Drink honey if you are constipated.

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...

This is my lifesaver soup! Doesn't need any boiling and doesn't need anything except some fresh kelp. I believe that soup should nourish the soul and tummy but like all busy bees these days, I sometimes don't have time to simmer soup for 2 hours. I need to zip in and out and watching the stove can be tedious. But never fear. If I can make this 3-minute soup, so can you. It's called Miso. ;-) My favourite instant soup. It is also great if you are feeling blue and not up for cooking but just want something to keep one's tummy warm. You can buy miso paste in single-serve packs or you can buy one whole carton of it (around 400 gm). Miso paste is basically fermented soya bean paste ("tau cheong") which we Chinese use often in cooking. I buy my miso paste at Jusco supermarket, RM4.50 for 10 packets of single-serve miso. Some miso paste have shreds of seaweed or kelp. Some come with bits of mussels. Of course since I don't read Japanese, I look at the graphic...

I made this soup today because I haven't tried this type of melon before (I mean I have not cooked it before). My mom-in-law always makes this soup whenever we are back in Kuching. It's called Shark Fin Melon or Spaghetti Squash (Cucurbita Ficifolia) because once cooked, the melon really resembles shreds of sharksfin! I confirmed this with the lady who sells vegetables at the Lip Sin market. In Hokkien, it is called Shark Fin Melon. I bought half a melon because I plan to make a pot of soup for 2 meals. The melon is distinguished by its smooth light green and pale green skin. Almost like a watermelon skin. (See how the whole melon looks like from this blog: http://eatzybitzy.blogspot.com/2005/06/sharkfins-in-melon.html ) The melon needs to be peeled and cut into chunks. The part which I didn't really relish was removing the seeds! There's a lot of seeds in this melon, even a chunk has about 4-5 seeds. You can be lazy and skip this part (that's what my vege woman sai...

I know this is not a soup BUT it does taste so good and takes less than 30 minutes to prepare. It has a bit of a gravy that goes well with plain rice. White radish is a versatile root vegetable. You probably have eaten radish in its other forms in Japanese or Korean cuisine. In Korean food, you probably have eaten radish as a spicy kimchi. In Japanese cuisine, you would have been familiar with "daikon" used in Japanese stews or even as a white shredded pile of mush you usually add to the dipping sauce for tempura. But a word of caution, if you have taken herbal soups such as ginseng a few hours before, you should NOT take anything (soup or otherwise) that is cooked with white radish. White radish detoxes the body of all the goodness that you have just eaten. I once heard that if you have food poisoning, taking white radish is good as it helps flushes out the unwanted from your body. Anyway, white radish is a vegetable you should eat if you want a clear complexion. Perhaps tha...