Ingredients for the Soup

I love to drink soup although I shouldn't be drinking it. Why? A yi shi once told me that plump people like me should avoid soup and thin people like my hubby should drink more soup. The reason... simply because all the goodness of the ingredients goes into the soup! I should avoid the hou liao (hao liao in hokkien) as I'm already quite plump, lol! Since both my children like to drink soup (really true Cantonese) and hubby should drink more soup, so I tend to boil soup whenever I have the time to cook meals for the family.

I love to put red dates and wolfberries (gouji) together with pork or chicken to boil the soup. I tend to use pork more than chicken as it's best avoided if one has cough (my little girl tends to have sensitive nose that may cause her to cough from times to times), and I was told that consuming too much chicken is not good, especially for the females (forgot the reason).

For the red dates, there's a lot of benefits from consuming them, which you can always look up on the Internet. One thing I would like to share though is that it is important to slit it opened so that you can remove the seed inside (can see from the following picture that my red date is opened), check and wash the internal portion. This was what my mum told me... She said that the seed has to be removed as it is heaty, which would make your soup or drink heaty. Maybe that's why I often feel heaty after drinking red dates longan tea ("double" heatiness from the red dates seed and longan, lol!) during confinement period as confinement lady usually not that hardworking to remove the seed (my mum noticed that my confinement lady for 2nd birth did not remove the seed despite repeated reminders). The internal portion also needs to be checked to see if it has rot inside (sometimes inside may be rotten but it still looks okay on the outside), and washed too.

For the wolfberries, it's also beneficial to include them in your soup as it's good for better eyesight. As for longan, it sweeten up the soup but I seldom put this into my soup as longan is heaty. I put longan this time round so as to balance up a bit of the cooling and heaty elements as I was boiling old cucumber soup that is cooling and red dates (with the seed removed) are cooling.

Another ingredient that I like to put into soup is dried scallop (gan bei), which is not in the picture, as I ran out of this for quite some time and haven't really gotten the time to replenish it at a reasonable price.

Since I'm on the topic of soup, I just thought I would share a dilemma that I have. Soup gets tastier and tastier after each reheating, so the soup tastes nicer and nicer on the 2nd/3rd day. However, I've been told that leftover soup can cause wind in our body. For sure, I won't let my children drink any soup that's leftover from previous night(s), but should adults be drinking then??? Sometimes it's just so convenient to use leftover soup to cook a bowl of tasty maggie mee as you don't have to put in any MSG at all...