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 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 ...