Saturday 4 October 2008

Soupy Nite


It's again another chilly evening, plus high force wind in full action outside. Not a pleasant nite to venture out. Better wrapped out warm, settled in with a nice book and listening to "pleasant to the ear" music or better still blogging in my very own corner of Apron's Delight.
Tonite I'm gonna make water cress with pork belly soup. I love this soup so much. For the past few nites I had cough occasionally. My mom had this remedy if I remembered correctly. She used to make them quite often when we had free supply of water cress from our next door neighbor. My mom used to patiently cook them over charcoal fire, simmering it slowly for hours. The longer you simmer , the tender the pork belly is and the goodness of water cress dissolves into the soup she said.
This easy to make and tasty soup is loaded with nutrition (esp iron & vitamins) . It is deemed to have the ability to detoxify the lungs[note good for heavy smokers & those suffering from being a second hand smoker, I'm neither of those ;-)] . The water cress also has a cooling property to it. It can be a cooling soup in the summer(add more water cress to it). In the colder days we can elliminate the water cress cooling property by reducing the amount of water cress used and simmered it longer~5hours on low heat. This is rather a simple soup but yet so satisfying, simplicity is the best policy, don't you agree.

Water cress and pork belly soup

Ingredients

good for 2 persons
  • 300gm pork belly
  • 170gm of water cress (this is for autumn days)
  • 6 red dates-pitted
  • 1 litre water
  • 1 small slow cooker
Put all the ingredient into the slow cooker, bring to a boil and let it simmer on low heat for at least 4 hours. This is soup is very tasty and can be served with rice. You can dip the pork belly into light soya sauce+minced garlic+lemon juice+birdeye chillis.

I just had mine.......waiting for miracle to happen, cough will go away tonite.....


4 comments:

Perry R. Lim said...

I know exactly the comfort of soup...we had anchovies (ikan bilis) and 'bayam' soup. Whole family loved it. Yumm....

Christine Toh said...

Bayam=Spinach? I think so.
Arghhhh.....the ikan bilis stock (anchovies), so good for all kind of soup, noodle soup, veg soup etc etc.

Another nice soup will introduce eventually is the pork rib, dried scallop, radish soup.....salivating....

Perry R. Lim said...

Yeah...it's Malaysian spinach. It's slightly different from the orang putih ones.

I'm boiling corn and chicken soup, chinese style. Yummy!

Christine Toh said...

Here I called it Popeye Spinach :-) of course not in a can but rather came in a bag readily prepared. All the stalks removed, only leafs remained and they're washed as well.