The Soup Queen

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...

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...

Yes, people, I am still around and I have not fallen off the face of this blog. I have not been doing much soup stuff as I have been totally immersed in work from the moment we finished our Chinese New Year holidays. Yes, what recession? I have been up to my ears in work and more work. The good thing is, I'm getting the green light to hire myself an assistant writer. For the company of course. Not for this blog, unfortunately. Otherwise, soup recipes will be a daily occurrence here! But I will dig up some soup recipes this week. Actually I have been baking bread and making meatloaf and baking butter cakes but I have been so naughty in that I have not made much soup - unless you count instant tom yam soup as soup. Nope, in my books, instant tom yum soup is just that - instant soup. Not worthy of mention. I'll be back tomorrow with soup recipes. Hang in there!

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...

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...