Dried Krill Seaweed Soup 銀蝦紫菜湯

Chinese soups are wonderfully healthy and yummy.  Did you know that there are all different sorts of Chinese soups?  There are the long cook kinds of soup where a lot of ingredients are slowly simmered over many hours to a rich, health enhancing and savoury perfection.  So good!  There are also the nourishing soups that are specific to tweaking the balance of your body.  And then there are the soups that you can make quick and easy, on a daily basis, to augment your daily meal and comfort your soul.

This soup one is one of the latter.  Fast, super healthy and yummilicious.  And so satisfying!  My hubby's crazy easy to make but oh so super delicious Dried Krill Seaweed Soup 銀蝦紫菜湯.  Total soup-iliciously nom nom territory!

Flounder Fish Soup Noodles 甫魚麵

Sometimes you just want to appreciate a little bit of something exquisite, a slurp of delirious deliciousness in a bowl, ya know what I mean?  Well, here's the perfect thing to satisfy that desire: Flounder Fish Soup Noodles 甫魚麵, a bowl of the most yummilicious noodles soaked up with stock and sprinkled with umami packed roasted flounder fish powder.  Ready to slurp down in a quarter of an hour!  Sounds simple, dear readers, but don't be deceived.  This seeming humble bowl of noodles packs a powerful punch of flavor and satisfaction!

Seafood Udon Soup Noodles

A simply scrumpious bowl of seafood noodles to slurp and gobble down!  What could be better than a few select treasures from the sea afloat a comforting bed of thick and chewy noodles all tucked into a hot savory soup?  Hummm...not much that I can think of!

Noodles for dinner is always lots of fun cuz it's easy to put together a pretty well rounded and spectacular looking bowl of noodles fast.  Minimal effort for maximum yummiliciousness, amirite?  Plus noodles are so scrummy to gobble down!  Try our easy Seafood Udon Soup Noodles and see if it doesn't make you happy!

Sugar Cane Imperatae Water Chestnut Tonic 竹蔗茅根紅蘿蔔馬蹄水

Here's a favorite Chinese tonic, perfect for soothing dryness, quenching the thirsties and expelling dampness from your body.  Sugar Cane Imperatae Water Chestnut Tonic 竹蔗茅根紅蘿蔔馬蹄水 is a tonic with a longish name but it's super simple to make and delicious and healthy to drink!

Winter Melon Roasted Duck Soup 冬瓜燒鴨湯

This very easy to make Winter Melon Duck Soup is so delicious and deeply satisfying.  And gorgeous to look at.  And so easy to make!  Wait,wait...first I must say that I'm not completely convinced it's a soup rather than a dish.  It's certainly deliciously soupy.  It's also most assertively a dish in its own right.  Let's just call it a superliciously soupy dish then!

This Winter Melon Roasted Duck Soup 冬瓜燒鴨湯 is filled to the brim with tender melt in your mouth pieces of winter melon soaked through with flavorsome duck infused soup as well as delicious bites of succulent tender roasted duck.  For a family dinner it's both soup and dish in one!  This wonderful soupy dish is perfect for the warmer months as winter melon is super refreshing and cooling to the body.

Chinese Almond Dessert Soup 杏仁糊

This delicious and soothing sweet concoction is know as Chinese Almond Dessert Soup 杏仁糊, or also sometimes as Chinese Almond Tea 杏仁茶.   Rather ironically it's not made of almonds at all, rather it's made from the kernels of apricots, apricot seeds, also known as xingren or 杏仁.  Probably the reason it's called an 'almond' dessert is because apricot seeds exude an intense, delicious, almond-y aroma that is really just lovely.  More almond-y than almonds!  

This dessert soup is considered by the Chinese to be soothing for the lungs, helping to stop coughs and just generally boosting your health.  

Chinese Fermented Rice Poached Egg Soup 酒釀蛋

 

We made a big jar of Chinese Fermented Rice 甜酒釀 recently cuz my little girl loves the stuff and she's been bugging me to make some for her.  And it's the perfect thing to help boost our immunity for the oncoming winter weather.  

This wonderfully fresh, sweet and slighty winey fermented food is packed full of all kinds of probiotics, amino acids, vitamins and minerals that your body needs to thrive.  The probiotics in particular help to balance the bacteria in your gut which is a key player in helping to boost immunity.  

Now that we have a big ol' jar of this stuff, I've started making this homey but wonderfully satisfying breakfast treat, Chinese Fermented Rice Poached Egg Soup 酒釀蛋, a simple soup of sweet fermented rice mixed with hot water and topped with a poached egg.  Each spoonful carries the winey sweet taste of fermented rice and a swirl of bright creamy egg yolk.   This soup makes you feel warm and fuzzy and totally ready to take on a new day!

Chinese Hot and Sour Soup 酸辣湯

This classic Chinese Hot and Sour Soup 酸辣湯 is always on the menu at Chinese restaurants, its bold contrast of sour and spicy and loads of delicious bits of flavors and textures in a thickened broth make it a perennial favorite with all Chinese food lovers.  I remember ordering it with my family when eating out at China town restaurants when I was a little girl and I'm still ordering these days whenever I see it's on the menu.

Since we've been at home A LOT lately, we've been missing its deliciously vibrant flavors so we decided to try making this soup at home.  Or rather my hubby 老公 decided it, he really loves this soup, has done so since in utero apparently.  (His mom lived off this stuff while pregnant with him!)  We discovered that this Chinese Hot and Sour Soup 酸辣湯 , while requiring a good bit of knife work, is actually quite easy to make at home and comes out just as good as the ones we've had in restaurants and maybe even a bit better!

Macanese Shrimp Vermicelli Soup 澳門蝦湯米粉

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but my 老公 has some roots in Macau.  His mother's family lived there for a couple of generations before moving to Hong Kong.  So he has an ongoing obsession with the place which is really all too easy to understand as Macau is an altogether fascinating place.  It's a city with a history nearing 500 years, one of the first trading posts in the Far East, and was and still is exquisitely poised inbetween East and West.

This unique characteristic shows through in both the people of Macau, the Macanese, and the Macanese cuisine.  They are both a mix of all the different cultural influences that touched upon the tiny trading port, from Chinese to Portuguese, to Malay and Japanese, Sinhalese and even Indian.  The cuisine of Macau is really the world's first 'fusion' food, using and mixing elements of all these cultures together to form a truly distinct cuisine.  So fascinating and truly unique, a thing hard to find in the current 'global' world.

As part of his recent Macau obbsession, my 老公 made this deceptively simple looking soup noodles and it was SO YUMMY!  This Macanese Shrimp and Vermicelli Soup Noodles  澳門蝦湯米粉, or Sopa de Lacassá, is a traditional Macanese dish usually prepared as a light lunch or perhaps an afternoon snack and is, as traditional and truly tasty food ought to be, a bit more complicated and time consuming than your average instant noodles, but TOTALLY worth it!! 

Chinese Amaranth Soup 紅莧菜湯

Here's a gorgeously healthy Chinese soup that's a cinch to make.   Plus it's PINK!  That's right, it's not an illusion, we're talking today about pink soup!  My little girl was completely delighted with this soup that seemed to jump right out of one of her story books and, to be honest, so was I.

This Chinese Amaranth Soup 紅莧菜湯 is not only a thing of beauty but also super easy to make and super healthy and super yummilicious!

Chinese Duck Lettuce Wraps with Duck Bone Soup 鴨鬆生菜包 | 鴨骨湯

This Christmas we roasted a duck and it was delicious!  But it was quite a lot for the three of us and thus we had lots of ducky leftovers.  Humm...what to do, what to do...and then a lightbulb hit us!  

We dusted off that old classic, the Chinese Duck Lettuce Wrap 鴨鬆生菜包, a simple and fabulous way to use up meat leftovers to create a scrumptiously savory mince that is then wrapped in fresh crunchy lettuce and eaten...with your fingers!  Yeah, I love finger food!  But wait...it gets better...

Braised Yellow Croaker Fish and Pickled Vegetable Soup 雪菜大湯黃魚

This classic authentic Shanghai dish is simple to make but simply fabulous to eat.  We recently made it for the first time and then had to make it again and again and again.  It is so yummilicious!  

The Braised Yellow Croaker Fish and Pickled Vegetable Soup 雪菜大湯黃魚 is a meltingly tender and tasty braised fish bathed in a beautiful white fish soup with preserved vegetable, bamboo and jin hwa ham until all flavors are melded together.  Not only do you have delicious braised fish to eat,  you also get a truly delectable soup to sip on, a time saving two in one dish!

Pear & Snow Fungus Tonic Soup 雪梨雪耳湯

With the change in the weather in Hong Kong really kicking in this month, the famous humidity of the long, long summer has dropped away, leaving cool and very dry days behind.  My little girl has a 'hot' nature according to Chinese Medicine, with dry skin, hot body and easy perspiration and thus the sudden dryness of the weather has inflamed her 'hot' nature to the point where she has also been getting a lot of nose bleeds.  

The Chinese, naturally, have a healing soup for everything and so there are plenty of soups that soothe the heat of the body.   I bustled myself down to the wet market today to get the fresh ingredients to make a little pot of the traditional Chinese healing and strengthening soup known as Pear & Snow Fungus Tonic Soup, or 雪梨雪耳湯, that helps to soothe and tonify the body to more easily make the transition into the dryer cooler temperatures of the autumn.

Green Bean Licorice Prickly Heat Herbal Tea 生地綠豆甘草茶

Do you ever think about how much beverage we buy and lug home to drink?  Water, juices, sodas, etc.  Heavy to lug home, liquid in bottles is heavy, amiright?  We buy beverages too, but it's been humming in the back of my mind for a while that there must be a better option.  

What, for example, did people used do for everyday for cool and refreshing drinks in the days before the invention of modern packaging?  They made their own drinks, of course!  

So recently when my little girl's eczema flared up again due to the already humid weather descending over Hong Kong, I decided to cook up a big ol' pot of Green Bean Licorice Prickly Heat Herbal Tea, or 生地綠豆甘草茶.  A cool, inexpensive, refreshing sweet Chinese beverage that makes a great everyday drink and soothes itchy skin and prickly heat.

Watercress & Fish Ball Soup 鯪魚球西洋菜湯

Recently my 老公 has been trekking out to all the far flung ends of Hong Kong for his work.  There has been a wonderful side benefit to us on the eating side of things, though, cuz he's been finding and bringing back home all sorts of delicious things to cook and eat!  

The other day he came back tired and hungry with a really huge bag of something green.  I scratched my head at first, wondering what on earth he could of brought back that was so big and green.  Turns out it wasa big ol bag of farm fresh watercress, picked that very day from Hong Kong fields!  

Wow, I could have never imaged that, living as we do in the middle of a concrete jungle, we could still cook up a yummilicious pot of Watercress & Fish Ball Soup 鯪魚球西洋菜湯 using freshly picked watercress!

Winter Melon Pork Bone Soup 冬瓜豬骨湯

For the Cantonese, drinking soup is like drinking from the fountain of life.  Since I've been in Hong Kong, I've caught the soup bug too, and why not, Chinese soups are soooo delicious!  Once I got used to having soups like these, I now find that I long for them, feeling like a wrung out rag when I don't get enough of these luscious liquids into my tummy.  

Lately we've been super happy cooking with our latest yummilicious discovery for making soup: using pork bones!  (I know, I know...everyone knows that already, right?!)  But do you seriously realize just how good of a soup you can make at home with just a bit of pork bones?  It is so good that it's sinful!  

It's a soup so sweetly savoury that it'll knock your socks right off!  Try out our Winter Melon Pork Bone Soup 冬瓜豬骨湯 recipe (with our secret for intensifying flavor) and see if you're still wearing socks after your first luscious sip!

Fish Ball Soup Rice Noodles 魚蛋湯米粉

Sluuuuurp!  Nothing like a good ol' bowl of chinese soup noodles to warm you up on a cool windy day!  Not that it's that cold yet here in Hong Kong, but it's slowly and surely (I hope!) getting there.  Slightly cooler days now with rough and tumble winds sweeping in from the sea.  So on the other (slightly cooler) day we were feeling lazy for the cooking and all the washing up and stuff and we were like, hey, why don't we just make a couple of easy hot bowls of noodles for dinner?!  Sluuuuurp!

 
What we ended up with, this delectable bowl of Fish Ball Soup Rice Noodle, or 魚蛋湯米粉, is soooo easy to prepare and soooo yummilicious to your tummy and (yeah!) super easy to clean up after!  Plus I just love fish balls, they're so damn sexy!

Chinese Pear Herbal Tonic Soup 川貝雪梨湯

One lovely autumn day long, long ago, my Grandma, the dearest stubbornest little old Chinese lady that ever was, decided enough was enough!  She had waited and watched over the large pear tree in our neighbor's yard, just drooping with ripe juicy fruit, for days upon days.  Our neighbors evinced no interest at all in their luscious pears and they were starting to fall to the ground and rot.  

Waste not, want not was ever my Grandma's motto, and so very early that morning she, a little old Chinese lady armed with a big long stick, marched over to our neighbor's garden fence and began to knock those juicy pears right out of the tree.  Whatever fell outside the fence was hers and she came proudly  home that day with huge bagfuls of pears.  

My 爸爸 was so exasperated!  "You could have been shot!" he huffed.  But Grandma didn't care one whiff and soon a delicious potful of Chinese Pear Herbal Tonic Soup  川貝燉雪梨 was simmering on the stove.  I still remember that first golden spoonful of deliciously sweet, light, soothing soup.  Just the thing to sooth and heal sniffles and a cough.  There's really nothing quite like Grandma's pear soup!

Fish Tail Rice Soup 魚尾泡飯湯

Here's a great two in one Chinese seafood dish that will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.   For the Chinese there's nothing like fresh fish and super duper nothing like hot, aromatic, milky white fish soup!  

So if, one of these days, you thinking what to make for dinner, but humm...you're feeling a little lazy, plus you've got a sudden craving for fish and soup and have some leftover rice in your fridge, why not try this yummilicious and easy to make Fish Tail Rice Soup, or 魚尾泡飯湯, and get two (and a half, really) dishes for the effort of making one!

Green Bean Dessert Soup 綠豆沙

There is almost nothing so soothing and cooling to drink on a hot, hot summer's day than Chinese Green Bean Dessert Soup.  My grandma used to make big pots of this wonderful soup for us, store it in the fridge and we would help ourselves to big delicious bowls to cool ourselves off after a hot day of play.  

So just as this really hot summer typhoon weather has settled in on us in Hong Kong, I suddenly remembered, (duh! strikes forehead),  the perfect thing to rustle up for taking the edge off this heat is this wonderfully body cooling Green Bean Dessert Soup, or 綠豆沙 or 綠豆湯.