Winter Melon Pastry Filling 冬瓜餡

 

Onward on another new and exciting food filling for our Five Flavors Mini Crystal Zongzi!  This Winter Melon Pastry Filling 冬瓜餡 is a filling that surprised us quite a bit.  I had never realized that the Winter Melon Candy could be used to make a filling!  Even though candied, the winter melon candy still retains the sponginess of the original melon, thus, when transformed into this filling, it soaks up all the flavors it is cooked with, especially the floral hints from the osmanthus flower syrup.  Sweet and delicate, this unique filling is quite delectable!

Eight Treasures Winter Melon Soup 八寶冬瓜盅

This spectacular traditional Chinese soup Eight Treasures Winter Melon Soup 八寶冬瓜盅 is not only beautiful and decadently delicious but also most excellent for relieving of the summer heat.  The soup is made using all parts of the winter melon: the flesh as an ingredient in the soup and the hollowed out melon itself as the soup 'tureen'.  

With a large sized winter melon this soup makes for a knock your socks off presentation, soup served in a carved and hollowed out melon 'tureen', so cool!  For the home version you can nowadays find the mini winter melon at markets.  We used these to make individual soup tureens of winter melon soup.

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.

Candied Winter Melon Tea 冬瓜糖涼茶

As the season turns and the days grow warmer it's time for some "cooling teas" also known as 涼茶.  Chinese believe that the food that they eat balance and nourish the body to good health, especially with respect to the needs that seasonal changes bring to the body.  Cooling teas help to dispel the heat, or 熱氣, caused by warm weather.

This particular cooling tea caught my eye because the main ingredient is one of my favorite fruit candies, the candied winter melon 冬瓜糖.  We've actually made winter melon tea before from fresh winter melon and it was plenty delish.  So now we got to try it with candied winter melon. 

The results were most satisfying and a lot easier to make. The candied fruit provided an intense but totally light vanilla sweetness with grassy notes and a touch of smokiness to a most delightfully refreshing Candied Winter Melon Tea 冬瓜糖涼.  This fragrant herbal tea was a cinch to whip up!

Winter Melon Tea 冬瓜茶

This delightfully soothing and refreshing Winter Melon Tea 冬瓜茶 is something we recently discovered when eating out at a local Taiwanese restaurant.  It was so refreshing and good I couldn't believe that I'd never come across this delicious drink before!  

Apparently it's a widely enjoyed beverage in Taiwan and super healthy to boot, chock full of vitamin C (boosts immunity!), antioxidants, magnesium, phosphorus and calcium.  Super good for your health!  Winter melon is considered cooling to the body in Chinese medicine so this is the perfect refreshing drink as the weather starts to warm up.  

It was a serendipitous discovery as I've been obsessing recently over the issue of drinks and the fact that modern life seems to requires that a lot of drinks be purchased and lugged home.  I always wondered, what did folk do for drinks back in the days before supermarkets and convenience stores?  They made them at home, of course, and thus my search has been to discover traditional healthy teas and tonic drinks that can be easily made at home.   

What a cool thing it is to have a constant supply of delicious easy to make healthy tea/drink in fridge to sip whenever one is thirsty!

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!