The Soup Queen

Here's the thing - remember that 3 days ago I wrote about trying out this strange folksy remedy with a steamed orange to help with my incessant coughing? I tried my first steamed orange on Friday afternoon. I overdid the salt so I ended up with a saltier orange "juice" - the water that pools under the orange after steaming. I don't know what that's called but I call it juice since it is the water plus orange juice plus salt. I ate the orange pulp and drank up the salty juice. It was so salty my eyes were tightly shut as I drank it up! Busy Saturday, Peppermint & Carrot  On Saturday I was out and about starting from 9am. I was in a 3 hour workshop in an air-conditioned room and boy was it bad for my cough! My cough was definitely affected by extreme cold. I had to drink copious amounts of hot water to still my itchy throat. This was one of those coughing fits which was so bad that I teared up and my nose turned red. I had some relief by applying my Yo...

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...

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...

I tend to poke about the kitchen a lot more on weekends. Sweet red bean dessert with dried longan and rock sugar Cooking is my therapy. It gets me away from computers and the Internet for two days. Today, I made some red bean dessert for tea. Yes, for tea. We Chinese like our desserts for those in-between meal times. Actually you could drink/slurp this dessert any time of the day. For me, it just so happened that the dessert was ready around 4pm and tea it was. Red beans or adzuki beans are commonly used in Asian food. In Chinese cuisine, red beans are normally eaten in sweet form, but I have eaten it as a soup, a savoury version when my Mom-in-law boiled it as a soup with pork bones. Nic was aghast at the taste but like a dutiful son, he drank up the soup though he did tell me privately that it was rather weird to have a savoury red bean soup. I thought so too. All my life, I've grown up drinking a sweet red bean dessert so savoury red beans do taste odd! Red be...