WINTER RECIPES FOR CHINESE MEDICINAL SOUPS
Winter nights offer the perfect excuse to stay inside and relax. They help us reflect, regroup and remind us that we need to nurture ourselves with comfort foods and home remedies to ward off any burgeoning bugs. The Park Slope Food Coop Recipes website is home to the following introduction, by Libby Halstead, about the medicinal benefits of Chinese soups. The following PSFC recipes are provided by Roseanne Yan Kong.
“For those willing to venture beyond the Coop and do some food shopping at a Chinese grocery store, traditional Chinese winter soups are said to have healing and preventative properties. According to Coop member Roseanne Yan-Kong, herself a native of China, soup is an important part of a Chinese family's meal and winter soups have revitalizing properties to help fight common ailments such as sore throat, colds, fevers, cracked or blistered lips, sore gums, dry nose, accumulation of mucus or coughs. These symptoms are said to be related to lung function, and the two recipes that follow, commonly served by Chinese families, may help to strengthen the lungs.”
[According to Yan Kong, these soups are usually prepared with meat stock or bones for extra calcium and nutrients, but will still yield benefits without meat. Vary the quantity of each vegetable according to your taste].
INGREDIENTS
Soup #1
Green daikon
Dried apricot seed (peeled)
Sweet dried dates
Soup #2
Watercress
Red carrot
Dried sweet dates
Lo Han Guo (a dried seed pod commonly used to revitalize the lung)
INSTRUCTIONS
To prepare the soups, cut vegetables into medium cubes, and cook all ingredients together just covered in water over low heat for 2 hours or until the water is reduced by half.
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