The Soup Queen

If you read this blog long enough, you know I love convenience. Maybe because I am lazy. I like to think that I like shortcuts to health. Anyway, for the past 4 months I have been taking this product that I feel has been doing me good, despite its hefty price tag.  But first, a little introduction is in order.  It's a product from Taiwan called Bing Han Refined Ginseng Powder and it's made from panax ginseng.  Bing Han Ginseng Powder from Taiwan It is water soluble. Which means I can dissolve it in water and drink it up. In my books, it's always a good thing right? Sheer convenience.  I had heard of the miraculous things people have said about ginseng. When my late grandmother was alive, she was given Korean ginseng and her white hair started turning black!  Anyway, Chinese folks love their ginseng. It's a well-known fact. I had a friend who used to drink ginseng soups when she was pregnant. Her two children do have beautiful skin!...

This definitely isn't a soup. It's a stew but it's such a robust, hearty stew that I have to share it with you. First of all, eating mutton was not part of my childhood. My mom never cooked mutton, noting that mutton was tough and had a gamey sort of smell.  When I was a teenager, I got it into my head that I won't eat mutton or beef. (Errr....to hell with teen ideals...I happily eat both beef and mutton now. I have a long way to go to be a vegetarian!) Mutton Stew with Carrots and Onions As I grew older, I started trying out all types of cuisine and I most loved Indian mutton curry especially mutton varuval. Oh how I loved my mutton varuval. It was spicy and yummy and all the things the cardiologists never want you to eat. When I was growing up, I always had cold feet especially if it was a week before my menstruation. This was part and parcel of PMS together with awful headaches, bloatedness and breast tenderness. Yes, I had the whole bloody works of ...

Sorry for the lack of posts. It's not that I have not been making soups but life and business intervened. Business, clients, family, life.  Whenever I get tired or bored, I'd head to the kitchen. I'll try a new recipe and a lot of people find cooking tedious (especially in my case when it's just my husband and me). Some people ask me, "Isn't it far easier to head out to the hawker stalls or a coffeeshop and get dinner over and done with?"  After all, I am living in Penang. The island with the most lipsmackingly delicious street food.  I admit that cooking small portions can be tedious BUT as I said, cooking and tinkering in the kitchen is my escape from a world that gets too hectic (at least for me).  Cooking and gardening are my escapes.  So this blog post is inspired by what's growing in my tiny patch of garden.  I've been growing serai or lemongrass in a pot in my garden. It's been thriving happily. But at times...

You know how it is with herbs. You don't really pay attention to it until you need it. Which is precisely what happened. Nic was complaining of a dull ache near his heart a few weeks ago. He was worried, I could see. After all, having a heart problem is no laughing matter. He is 40 years old but he has been physically fit most of his life. In fact, I am the one with the aches and pains. I am the one with knots in my shoulders (from hunching over the laptop no less) and need my fortnightly reflexology or Thai body massage sessions. He attributes his good health to cod liver oil which he took as a kid. This is not the first time I heard of the cod liver oil theory. I had heard it before from my ex-boss about a decade ago (that was when I was still working for others). He said the same thing. He said his daughters never had a cold or flu after taking cod liver oil. Nic is not a believer in Western medicine. He thinks it's a load of crock especially when doctors these da...

Ho Yan Hor Gold Herbal Tea ...the tea I take on my travels!  Here's one of those quick Chinese herbal remedies that I always carry around with me, especially if I am going to go on a trip. It's Ho Yan Hor Herbal Tea. Unlike some bloggers who are paid to tout the benefits of a certain product (and review the product but say all sorts of super nice things about the product), I hereby declare that I am not one of them. I don't know any of the directors of this company, I am in no way linked to them and I am not getting any commission for spreading the good word about their herbal teas. I am writing as an avid drinker of their Chinese herbal teas. While most people will take flu medicine, Panadol and all matter of tablets and pills on a trip, I will bring along a few packets of this tea. Travelling (even domestic travel) can take a toll on the body. Sometimes you drink less water, eat more (or shall I say, gorge more since everything looks fabulously delicious w...

I was away for a while because my paternal grandmother passed away on 2 February. We were busy with the funeral a week before Chinese New Year. Technically speaking, this year I am not really allowed to celebrate the Lunar New Year or give angpows. Of course the funeral director says that as a grand-daughter who has married, I am "following" my husband so I am allowed to celebrate. I couldn't. So it was a low-key Lunar New Year for me. You know how it is when someone you love passes away. Who would be in the mood to celebrate? My grandma was all of 95 and had been rather sickly, refusing to eat. My aunts were perplexed. They finally resorted to using a syringe to feed her porridge. She had been bedridden for sometime now but we always thought, nah, Grandma will always be around. She couldn't recognize anyone - not her children or her grandchildren - but she was always that unifying force, someone who made us all return to the big old house again a...

Clockwise, from top: fresh corn, dang shen, goji berries,& kudzu root Quite an intriguing title for today's post right? I was introduced to this soup by the auntie in the Lip Sin market. She's a regular grandma in her 60s but she operates a vegetable stall in the market and she's often my source of recipes, particularly soups. Last week, she introduced me to fresh kudzu. See that blob above in the photo that looks like a turnip or "bangkuang"? She told me it's called "fen kok" in Cantonese. I have never come across it before. I am particularly excited when I come across ingredients I've never used. This was no different. So I asked her what I could do with this "fen kok". She told me that it's good for boiling soups. She even told me that I should boil "fen kok" with some fresh corn, goji berries and "tong sum" (Cantonese) or "dan shen" (Chinese sage or salvia miltiorrhiza) and of cour...

Happy New Year everyone! I took a long break for Christmas and finally we all survived the Mayan prophecy but Nic asks in an almost sinister manner - How do you know if we're not all walking zombies? What if we all died in our sleep on 21 Dec and we're now in an alternate universe but we are unaware of it? My retort to that is: if I were a zombie, I'm still a zombie with my old personality - that is, I still want to look good, age well and eat well. Ah so. But this zombie has promised to write about my other discovery on getting hair to become black. See, vain zombie this is! Of course besides dyeing my hair with henna (something which my hair stylist, Desmond absolutely does not like but hey, it's my hair OK and my brain and I certainly don't want chemicals seeping into my brain cells for an hour), I have attempted to adjust my diet to include more hair-friendly ingredients. Just the other day when I was back home in Banting, my 34 year old sister wa...

This isn't a slow simmered soup that takes 2 hours on the stove. No.  This is a quick 20 minutes soup that you can make on days when you want something nourishing and you just got home from work and you're too damn tired to call for take-out.  This is my go-to soup that's nutritious and flavourful. Packed with only 3 good ingredients - tofu, bittergourd and minced pork.  You can even just cook some rice (in the rice cooker) while you make this soup. Once the rice is done, so's your tofu soup.  Here's how you do it.  1 packet of soft tofu, cut into cubes 1/2 cup minced pork/chicken - marinate with some salt, pepper, cornstarch and sesame oil  1/2 bittergourd, sliced thinly* some chopped garlic spring onions to garnish salt & pepper to taste 800 ml water  Heat up some 2 tablespoons oil in a pot. Add garlic. Stir until it browns. Add water. Cover and bring it to a boil. Once it is boiling, drop t...

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...

I know. It sounds unbelievable right? Steamed green apple with American ginseng will cure your headaches forever? Isn't it such an audacious claim? Really? Does it work? Actually, these were my reactions too when I heard it from - of all people - my mum! As I live in Penang and my mum lives in Selangor (Banting, to be specific, which is a little town near Morib and one that's well-known for its seafood), we have regular phone conversations. These days it's much easier because calls are free - we use Viber a lot. So we have long conversations. About food. About life. Mostly food. She knows I love my food. And I like taking good care of myself. I am a hedonist. I probably learnt that from her. She's always telling me how we should all eat better. It is true though. With better nutrition, you do feel immensely better. That is why SoupQueen exists, right? ;-) Here's how the story goes. My mum often goes to the Sunday market in Banting where there's lots...

Do you like mulberries? I find them rather fascinating fruits because they're a cross between raspberries (in look) yet with the tartness of lemons. My friend, Don, once offered me a tiny mulberry that he plucked off his mulberry plant. As we live in Malaysia where the weather is hot, the mulberry was prized indeed. It was barely red enough. It tasted tart. But I like tart fruits so that was all right.  When I was in Hong Kong last year, I managed to buy some fresh ones and they were much larger than the tiny one grown by Don. For about HK$15, I bought a box (see below) at the local Hong Kong evening market. Looks like a lot of fruits right?  Mulberry fruits or mulberry berries? Bought these from a market in Hong Kong. Don't be fooled by the overflowing basket. The berries are propped up by lots of foam! Sneaky HK fruit sellers prop their baskets with foam so that you just get a handful but it seems like a lot! I think that is really cheating. I'd prefe...

This is a soup that I made one day while trying to clear up leftover vegetables in the fridge. I had half a carrot and some fresh wai san. So I made this soup which I think tastes infinitely better than plain old wai san with pork ribs.  Carrots in soups make soups taste a lot "sweeter".  For this soup, you will need: 1/2 carrot, cut into chunks Fresh wai san, peeled and sliced 2 dried red dates, pitted 300gm of blanched pork bones 1 liter water Bring water in a pot to boil and add in all the ingredients. Boil on high heat for 10 minutes before putting the lid on your pot. Reduce fire to a mere simmer. Simmer soup for 2 hours. Add salt to taste. You must let your soup "sit" and have the flavours develop once your soup is ready. I noticed that if I immediately serve the soup, it won't taste as good. Let it "sit" for 30 minutes or so before serving. The soup is flavourful and of course you must eat up the carro...

Each Sunday I try to find a new herbal recipe to test. I love my Sundays when I lounge at home, listening to the jazz channel and sipping homemade herbal tea while reading. Today I dug out some wolfberries or "kei chi" or goji berries from the fridge. I am usually running out of space in my fridge because all my herbs go into the fridge. In this tropical weather, herbs will either dry out or go mouldy if you keep them too long in the cabinets. One distinct way to know if your wolfberries are deteriorating is to see their bright red colour becoming a dull, dirty red. That's why you know your wolfberries can go into the compost bin! (Or maybe you can stick them into some soil and grow your own goji berry plants. I might try this though finding available space in my already thriving garden can be tough!) This packet of wolfberries is considered Super Grade because each wolfberry is larger than regular itty bitty ones you see in most pre-packed herbal soup packets. My r...