Of Apple and Snow Pear Soup and American Ginseng

Happy Lunar New Year to all friends around the world!  May you be filled with the God's peace and the assurance of his promises in this new year ahead!

Sorry this took so long, but this is the recipe I have promised since my last post about a Chinese tonic soup I cooked with my new ceramic pot!  Due to the excitement of actually making Chinese tonic soup for the first time, I totally forgot to take a picture of a bowl of the soup AFTER I prepared it.  So here's a picture from my recipe book called "Miraculous Soups" - the bilingual edition by Wu JiLin which I bought from Popular Bookshop.

This soup is interesting because it's called "American Ginseng Soup with Apple and Snow Pear.  According to my recipe book, it clears heat, moistens lungs, stops cough and expels phlegm.

I tried the soup simply to see how an apple and snow pear soup would turn out, and I must say, it turned out pretty well.

Apple?  We all know what that is.  Snow Pear?  That's actually "Li" or Chinese pear.  The ones with the brown textured skin.

Before we carry on, if you need to understand how much 1 mace and 1 tael is (that how Chinese herbs are measured),  I have the explained how that is measured in grams in my previous post.  Here's the link  "Of Chinese herbs and my new ceramic pot".


Ingredients

- 3-4 apples
- 2 snow pears
- 300g of lean meat (I used lean pork)

herbal ingredients

-  5 maces (approx 18.9g) American ginseng (top of the plate.  These come in slices - at least the ones I bought from the Chinese herbal shop.  Because the taste can be quite strong, I used only 3 maces, otherwise my kids were not too keen on drinking such a strong tonic)

chuan bei

- 1 mace (approx 3.8g) fritillaria bulb (the little round white bulbs on the right of the plate) or what is known in Mandarin as Chuan bei 川貝

dried figs

- 8 dried figs (right of the plate) 无花果 wu hua guo

sweet and bitter almond

- 3 maces (approx 11.3g) of sweet almond (bottom of the plate) 南杏 nan xing
- 2 maces (approx 7.6g) bitter almond (bottom of the plate) 北杏 bei xing

honey dates

- 3-4 honey dates (centre of the plate)  蜜枣 mi zao
- salt to taste



Method

1. Rinse fruits and cut them into pieces

2. Scald entire piece of lean meat in boiling water for 5 minutes

3. Rinse all the other herbs and set aside

4.  Place all the ingredient into the pot with 3000ml of water.  Bring to boil over high heat.  Once it comes to a boil, lower the heat to a simmer for 3 hours.

5.  Turn of the heat and season with salt.


And that's it.  It's that simple.  The soup turned out surprisingly pleasant because of the apple, the snow pear and the honey dates.  It's slightly sweet and yet slightly herbal (largely because of the ginseng).  So if you're not too keen on a very herbal taste, you can use less ginseng.

The hard part for me what trying to gather all the required ingredients because I wasn't sure what some of them looked it and how to purchase the ones with better quality.  I guess there's always a start to everything, right?  My best bet was to bring the list of ingredient straight to the Chinese herbal shop.  Much better if you know the Chinese names to the herbs.

New soup for a new year!  Enjoy!  I'm tried several more recipes from this book and will be uploading them soon!  Till then God bless!