dried octopus

Old Cucumber Melon Soup

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Old Cucumber Melon Soup

The old Cucumber Melon can readily be found almost everywhere and is available at your local wet market grocer or NTUC supermarkets. But for some reason, I have resisted cooking it until now.

Don’t get me wrong, I love this traditional soup especially at the Chinese restaurants and sometimes at the food courts. But like the Burdock Soup 牛蒡汤, I have only recently started cooking this melon soup.

Simple, nutritious and delicious. If I can do it, anyone can.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 medium size Old Cucumber Melon
10 pieces Dried Red Dates
5 pieces Dried Scallops
2 pieces Dried Octopus
250 grams Pork Ribs
Salt

Method

1. Cut the old Cucumber in half and gorge out the seeds with a spoon. Then chop into chunks. Place the pork ribs, red dates, scallops, octopus and the prepared melon into the pot. Add a little salt. Pour in a kettle of boiling water into the pot.

2. Boil for at least 20 minutes. Then place the pot in the thermal cooker and re-heat after 12 hours when you are back from work.

Bon Appetit!

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Old Cucumber Melon

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Delicious Old Cucumber Melon Soup

Lotus Peanut and Pork Ribs Soup

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Lotus Peanut and Pork Ribs Soup

I have always wanted to make this soup, but have until now been unable to do so for one reason or another. This was largely due to the fact that I was always forgetting to buy that one crucial ingredient – peanuts.

Now that I have gotten over that hurdle. I can finally make this Lotus Peanut and Pork Ribs Soup. Actually I believe I have made this soup once before but the peanuts didn’t cook as well as I would have liked. But that could also be because I was boiling the soup as opposed to cooking it in a 12 hour thermal cooking process. Also, I didn’t pre-soak the peanuts as most tradition home cooks would advise.

So I did it my way, and to be honest, the experts are right. You really need to pre-soak the peanuts overnight. Oh well, at least I managed to get a rather soft peanut, but not soft enough. Plus I kept it in the thermal cooker for more than 12 hours. Didn’t know peanuts are so resilient.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 long tube Lotus Root (they say the lotus root should be covered in mud, otherwise not so good quality)
A bowl of Peanuts (better to pre-soak overnight, I tried not soaking and failed, so please soak)
1-2 pieces of Dried Octopus
250 grams of Pork Ribs
Salt

Method

1. Boil a kettle of water. Place frozen pork ribs into pot. Throw the pre-soaked peanuts into the pot. Throw the dried octopus into the pot also. Wash the lotus root, shave off the skin, then slice the tubular root into beautiful shapes. After that throw into the pot. Add a pinch of salt to taste. Add boiling hot water. Boil for 20 minutes. After that, place in thermal cooker for 12 hours and let the magic happen.

Bon Appetit!

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Sliced Lotus Root

Bitter Gourd and Pork Ribs Soup

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Bitter Gourd and Pork Ribs Soup

It seems like the unlikeliest of collaborations, more unlikely than the Lotus and Radish Soup. The bitter gourd and pork ribs is what most of us would already know, but to have an octopus swimming around in the soup, I bet the final taste would be out of this world.

As it is, the mixture of the bitterness that is in the bitter gourd juxtaposed with that of the fishy aftertaste of octopus, is probably gonna taste really yummy. I can’t wait to taste this soup tonight. Something about pork ribs that makes the soup taste so much better than chicken bones. It’s such a simple recipe anyone can do it.

Recipe

Ingredients

200 grams of Pork Ribs
1 whole Bitter Gourd
1 piece dried Octopus

Method

1. Boil water, then pour into pot with ribs and octopus and let them get acquainted. After boiling for about 10 minutes, add the sliced bitter gourd and some sea salt. Continue to boil for another 5 minutes at high heat.

2. When done, take and place in thermal cooker and eat it when you get home. Perfect.

Bon Appetit!

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Sliced Bitter Gourd

Dried Baby Octopus

Ho Sim Lang

Dried Baby Octopus

If you are thinking invasion of the body snatchers, well you may not be entirely wrong. With their long extensible arms and legs ever ready to snatch anything within their grasp, it might not be so far fetched to think that they could be aliens from a distant galaxy.

Or if you just watched Penguins of Madagascar, then these three baby octopuses might not be so foreign to you. In fact they do look somewhat scary and cartoonish all at the same time if you thought about it now. But I am not introducing them as aliens or clever animation, they are in fact part of my latest tweak to my ABC Soup in an attempt to make the soup flavourful in a natural way.

If you are doing confinement as a newbie mummy, then maybe plain ABC Soup should be suffice. But if you want that extra bit of flavour, then a piece of the dried baby octopus would turn your very simple soup into an artisan masterpiece, worthy of mention in the many social dinners to come.

Hmmm, I can almost smell it now as the soup boils.

Bon Appetit!!