Chinese Walnut Dessert Soup 核桃糊

Here’s a yummilicious and tummy warming dessert for the cool nights of autumn.  This delectable and decadent creamy Chinese Walnut Dessert Soup 核桃糊 is easy to make and truly satisfying with the toasty, nutty rich flavor of toasted walnuts and the caramel notes of the slab sugars.  If you like nuts, you’ll go nuts over this sweet soup!

Lotus Seed Egg Tea 蓮子蛋茶

To bring in the new year we present our next delectable Chinese dessert soup.  This subtly delicious and comforting sweet soup will warm your heart and tummy in the depths of any wintery chill. Requiring only a few ingredients, this Lotus Seed Egg Tea (not sure why it’s called a ‘tea’ and not a soup?) 蓮子蛋茶 is deceptively simple to make.  

The result is a beautifully golden hued soup with a clear sweet delicate taste, bejeweled with melt in your mouth lotus seeds and sweet soft red jujubes.  Oh,  and there is the added delight of a hard boiled egg!  The egg is my favorite part, the slippery egg white and the melty egg yolk just tastes so good slurped in with the soup!  It's the perfect afternoon snack for a wintery day, both fortifying and comforting.

Add-on Note: I just found out that this tea is served to newlyweds to symbolize the hopes that they will soon conceive children.  The rather obvious symbols being the 'seed' and the 'egg'--he he!  

Tofu Skin Gingko Nuts Sweet Soup 白果腐竹糖水

We previously wrote about the traditional Chinese way to way "YES!" to love, with food of course, specifically with a wonderfully yummilicious plate of Sticky Rice Balls with Sesame and Crushed Peanuts 糖不甩, so stickily delicious that no one can resist your love.  

This time we are going to flip it over and talk about how to say a gentle "NO" to love, with food again of course, this time with a bowl of Tofu Skin Gingko Nuts Sweet Soup 白果腐竹糖水, a delicate, warm and comforting way to let a lover down.

Tang Yuan Dumplings Osmanthus Sweet Soup 桂花酒釀湯圓

Chinese New Year 中國新年 is come again and the city is stirring itself once again to great activity and anticipation for this most important and festive of Chinese festivals.  One thing I especially love about Chinese festivals is that they put into high gear the twin Chinese obsessions of eating and word play.

So first (and most importantly for me) there are tons of yummilicious things to stuff yourself silly with during the New Year celebration.  Secondly, not only are you're eating all this deliciousness you are also bringing yourself many good things by means of all this eating!  And how is that?  Well that's because all the Chinese New Year dishes have symbolic names that are lucky and auspicious.  

So for our first Chinese New Year recipe, we present you with Tang Yuan Dumplings in Osmanthus Scented Sweet Fermented Rice Soup, 桂花酒釀湯圓, a traditional Chinese dessert soup of tiny chewy rice dumplings nestled cozily into a soup flavored with the unique sweetness of fermented rice and scented with the aroma of delicate osmanthus flower.

The symbolic meaning here is the "roundness" or "圓" of the tong yuan 湯圓 which the Chinese interpret as the circle of family or life being complete and full.  

Chinese Sweet Potato Ginger Dessert Soup 番薯姜糖水

Brrrrrr! All day long a chilly autumn wind has been blowing in through the crack in my window, outside its been raining on and off and the world is all wet and dreary.  On days like this there's nothing that warms you up better than a touch of the right kind of traditional Cantonese sweet soup.  

And the right kind of sweet soup, at least for me, is the kind of sweet soup with a bit of ginger in it, no, no, I must be upfront, a darn boatload of ginger in it.  Yummm...that delicious spiciness of ginger!  How good this Chinese Sweet Potato Ginger Dessert Soup 番薯姜糖水 is, soft comforting pieces of luscious yams floating in a sweet and fiery soup that warms you right through to the tips of your toes!