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Past MessagesFebruary 2008Laura: Hi, I am from Edmonton, Alberta Canada. born and raised here. I stumbled across your site looking for clear soup recipes, as I have a whole Chiken that I want to try to make a clear soup tonight.. Phoebe: so did you find the recipe you are looking for? :P zhenlin: Hi! I really like the way you explain the history, culture and tradition of the dishes! I'm Singaporean too, and sometimes it's hard to convince foreigners the way we do things.. good job! Phoebe: Hi zhenlin, what a nice thing to say. Thanks! Kangarool: Hi Phoebe, this is a GREAT site for people who love wontons! I have never been happy with my homemade ones, and have learned some good tips reading through that I'll have to try. Here is one question i hope you can help me with: I live in Australia, but most of my life in America, and have travelled to Asia quite a bit. I love wontons with a very thin, translucent wrapper, that is usually whitish in appearance. I don't like the thick, yellow kind usually found in American fast food chinese restaurants. I have access to some great Asian markets and stores, but how do i choose fresh wonton wrappers that are of the kind i described? Is there a brand, or a way of specifying them, so that I'll get the really thin, silky smooth ones? Thanks... any advice you can provide would be greatly appreciated! Phoebe: Thanks for the compliment. I don't live in Australia so I am not familiar with the brands available there. The yellow wonton wrappers are usually Hong Kong made. You can try asking the markets for non-Hong Kong or non-Cantonese wontons. Patricia: I adore Chinese soups and in fact love all oriental soups. I shop at H-mart an oriental supermarket which carries cow heel meat or beef heel meat. Most orientals tell me it makes an excellent soup. I have never used it before and need to know about it and some recipes for it. I would appreciate your assistance. Thank you Phoebe: I am glad you like chinese soups so much. Sorry, I've not heard of beef heel meat. I'm not that familiar with meat cuts. From the name I guess it is meat near the heel of the cow. I guess you can try using a basic beef soup recipe to try and see how it goes. Try a simmering one. January 2008December 2007Phoebe: \(^-_^)/ November 2007Christyana maria, Indonesia: hi very nice site...can you pls send me herbal drink recipes ( like the ones we see around in spore)and maybe address of where I can get the herbals such as crysanthemum etc in spore or indonesia? Phoebe: Sorry, I haven't got time to get around to organizing herbal drink recipes. Will put it in my wishlist. Herbal tea packs can be found in local chinese medicinal halls and even at NTUC Fairprice. Scout around. There are 2 types: the instant vacuum-packed tea bags or the ones that you have to cook yourself. I haven't been to Indonesia, so I can't help there. Ash: Great JOB. I love trying new recipes. Visit ne-recipes.page.tl/ for nice and easy recipes JoAnn Olson, United States: I am trying to make a dessert with wontons in a weight watcher recipe and they are so hard they hurt the mouth to try and eat. What can I do to correct this? Thank you Phoebe: Hi Jo Ann, wonton wrappers are made with only flour and water and the optional egg. So they turn out really hard when baked because there isn't any fat in them. Refrigeration probably made it worse. Try the following:
Amy: Hi, Its a great site you got. Its really difficult to find homemade chinese soups online and I am so glad to find yours. Learnt few tips to make my soup taste better. Always wondering why mine tastes so bland. Thanks so much. Mike Shelton: Hello...just wanted to say I enjoyed your page and you’re cute, too! Thanks for the recipes, Phoebe: Thanks for the compliment! Lorraine: I thoughly enjoyed reading your web site and I have been looking for simple Chinese receipes as I believe one can be healthier with simple foods. Phoebe: Me too!! October 2007Phoebe: Hi Gene, I'm sorry but the description is too vague. Yatgawmein is also not mandarin, looks like the cantonese dialect. Can't figure it out. Tara: Hello from N.Y. USA. I enjoyed reading about wonton wrappers and the way to fold them. I am an American that is planning to try to make a Potsticker recipe and have never worked with the wrappers or spoke with anyone in China. Maybe you would like to try it also. Go to www.wolfgangpuck.com and search in the recipe section for Potstickers. I love how the wontons are boiled and then lightly pan fried to brown on one side to become crispy. Jim: I’m just now looking at your recipes for soup. I too, love the varied flavors of the chinese soups. I am a lover of all cultures soups. I feel that the soup dish represents the true nature of the people. Phoebe: Agreed! Susan B: Dear Phoebe, Your web site was amazing! I never knew such much information was available in one place. Thanx so much for all your recipes, tips, and ideas. I’m so glad I stopped by to check your wonderful website out. Your the greatest!! Thanx again. Matthew MacGregor, Canada: I live in vancouver and have travelled to hong kong and beijing. I just love the soups and found your recipes very easy to follow. Thank you so much. Siu: Thank you for your recipes. Deborah Green: Thank you for the won ton folding information, it was excellent, very, very well done, the pictures were epecially helpful and I smiled when I saw you showed them uncooked & then cooked, so you see the end result -- very thorough. This part of making soup was always annoying for me, I didn't know how to do it properly. So your info was perfect. Nice work -- THANK you! Phoebe: Hi Deborah, glad that you enjoyed that page. It was a moment of inspiration on a lazy Saturday afternoon. Wrapping wontons is always a tricky affair. Happy souping! Rose: Dear Phoebe, I’m a homesick Singaporean drooling over your lovely pictures. Thanks for all the wonderful recipes.;P Madeline, Australia: Dear Phoebe, as an german expat, having lived in Asia for 20 years and now retired in Australia our family is constantly craving all the wonderful asian food so readily available everywhere in the streets in Asia - so now I have to learn to cook.... YOUR SITE IS WONDERFUL!!! We are having our first wonton-party today ;-) and I pre-tasted; superduperspecialGOOD! THANKS AND PLEASE MORE RECIPIES! Mei: Hi phoebe, I’m not going to view chinese soups quite the same way now ... thanks for your interesting thoughts and opinions about the different soup recipes! Ivy Lim: Do you have receipt on anti-aging? When I was browsing in one of the book store here I came across a cook book. I browse through one of the pages and came across a receipt on anti-aging using wolfberries, tomatoes and olive oil, salt to taste do you have some info regarding this. Many thanks. Phoebe: hi Ivy, I haven't got any anti-aging soup recipes on hand. I will keep a look out and post one when I come across it okay? Linda: Hi..thank for your soups recipe. Im a kadazan and married with a chinese man. i would like to learn more abt chinese cooking esp soup. Pls send me any new chinese home recipe so that i can learn to cook and surprise my husband. Thank you so much... Phoebe: Hi Linda, I don't have time to send recipes to individuals. You may want to subscribe to my website's RSS feeds. When I update and add new recipes, you will receive a feed. Alternatively, bookmark my site and revisit to check for new recipes. Jamie Chen: My 3 year old son is constanly getting colds, when he gets better, another one starts again. I read you were the same when you were young until you took vitamin C. Do you know how much I should give my son???, how many mg??. My son's ped always give him cold meds that often don't help, and I think it's making his immunity weaker with the drugs. Phoebe: My mum gave me 2 orange tablets a day. It was Vitamin C supplements for children. The pharmacy should have them or a health supplement store. Follow the instructions on the bottle. I agree that children shouldn't consume cold meds too often. It will weaken the immunity system and the next attack will become more serious. Oh, cod liver oil is great too. My sister's boyfriend grew up on those and he swear by them. But...they may not be the best tasting thing around :P Kenneth Kawamura: (I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii; moved to Michigan for college and to get away from the hot weather; in the summer I complain that "for weather like this, I could have stayed home") I just now stumbled across your Chinese soups site while trying to find directions for different ways to weave "ketupat" (the Malaysian compressed rice dumpling wrappers). (One of my hobbies is Origami, paper folding; and my interest extends to wrappings and packagings, especially the various traditional wrappings, like the old paper cones used before the manufactured paper bags, the foot cloths used in Russia before machine-made socks, wonton folding [_thank you_ for your page!], ketupat weaving, palm frond weaving, . . .) Having grown up in Hawaii, I learned to like a variety of foods from many traditions. My mother used to cook "chook", using a Thanksgiving turkey carcass, and a "one part rice to ten parts water" rule of thumb. Comfort food! Here in Lansing, Michigan, there was a chinese restaurant (now out of business, -sigh-; the restaurant business is _so_ competitive, and times are hard), run under a succession of managements. In the last family, the husband was the principal cook, but when he couldn't be there (he worked another job to bring in money) his wife would cook, and she would occasionally treat me to her homemade chinese soups. Have you ever run into chinese sweet-flavored bean soups???? What I remember is a light, sugary broth, made from I'm not sure of which beans, maybe mung beans, with a few vegetables, mostly broth, mostly clear but slightly thickened, and very good. I'm guessing sugar was added, but the sweet taste might come from the beans. I don't know. Since I don't know chinese, she couldn't tell me exactly what the soup was, but it was good. Sometimes there were other ingredients. Once, tender tendrils from pea or bean plants, and another time a rehydrated seaweed (or fungus?) that looked like black hair and was supposed to be medicinal/'good for you'. I _think_ the couple were from Hong Kong, but I could be wrong. They had a little garden outside of the building, and introduced me to a wonderful leafy green edible plant, that I later learned is a veriety of amaranth, sometimes called pigweed, related to spinach, and grows as a weed around here; tho, wouldn't you know it, it never grows in my yard. I get catnip; and purslane (Yum!); and orange, single, daylilies (tho I like the flowers too much to harvest the buds; I just wash, chop, and stew up the spent flowers); and used to get pokeweed (but the three changes of water is too much work); but not the amaranth that I want. -sigh- Maybe someday. I have my eye on a stand growing near my library. If I'm very lucky, maybe I can harvest some seeds before it gets cut down and thrown away. I don't want to take it while it's green because it'll go moldy instead of ripening and drying properly. Anyway, please keep an eye out for the sweet bean soups. Thank you. Jade: Hi Phoebe, I am a Singaporean living in UK since 2002 and being a soup-lover, I prefer to cook my own soup with recipe taken from the internet and I love your website. What amazed me is that you look so young and seems to know so much like those old aunties!! Keep up the good work! Cheers! Phoebe: hi Jade, I have been known to "collect" many "useless" information ... the "hazard" of being a librarian. Jessica: thank you so much for sharing your recipes, your stories, and your techniques. I've been sick this past week and although I still live with my parents, my mom knows little about soups (she's a good cook though). I've been asking for some soup and finally decided that I better make it myself. I can't wait to go home and try this. I'm really looking foward to having this for dinner tonight. Thank you. H.Y. Leong, Malaysia: I note your site doesn't have shark fin soup which is good. I'm looking for an alternative soup to serve at a chinese wedding dinner. could you suggest a soup, or a shark fin melon soup recipe? i would like to use the recipe for our "Fins - Best on Sharks" campaign by the Malaysian Nature Society Marine Group (Selangor Branch). many thanks. Phoebe: I have tried shark fin melon soup and it is really good. Too bad, I do not have a shark fin melon soup recipe at the moment. Try this recipe by the WokkingMum. Janice: Phoebe!! you are amazing!! i love your website and i am gonna make some when my landlord aint around. haha!!! Jeremy: Hey there, I’m a Singaporean engaged in graduate study in Canada. I was scouring for recipes when I stumbled on your site. I’m a soup lover myself and your recipes will come in handy in pulling me through Ottawa’s dreary winters. Phoebe: Glad to be of help. Take care during the winter months. Mrs Chiang: Hi Phoebe, I was thinking of recording my soup recipes so that I could pass them down to my children. Your website is certainly a good reference point for me! Thanks and keep up the good work. August 2007lay swan: Hi Phoebe, I like your site. I am going to try cooking all your soup recipes. I’ve got a question - soloman’s seal - what is it? Any pictures? Phoebe: hi Lay Swan, The mandarin name for solomon's seal is yu zhu. Cantonese should be yok chok. Picture of solomon's seal is now posted at the chinese herbs webpage. July 2007June 2007May 2007April 2007Being Cantonese myself, soup is a very important dish on the dinnner table (well, having soup only fits me perfectly). I happened to chance upon your website while at work, so I have not read much of it yet. I am Singaporean working in Melbourne. Hope to keep in contact with you and i will explore your site further. Cheers, have a nice week ahead Phoebe: What a coincidence, I stayed in Melbourne for 2 years studying for my library science degree. Do come back often. Celeste: Phoebe, I enjoy your website! I tried your soup porridge recipe using a rice cooker, and it worked wonderfully well! Thanks so much for all the great recipes. Best February 2007January 2007Kristi: Phoebe, Thanks for your website. I lived in China for a short time, and one of the things I miss now is authentic Chinese food. I will use your soup recipes often. God’s Blessings! December 2006I started to use a thermal cooking pot recently and found it to be a wonderful way to cook food. My wife uses it to cook herbal soup occasionally, but you advise against it. May I know what is the reason? Thanks for your help. Merry Christmas, Phoebe: I added the answer on the thermal cooker webpage. Gary Yuen: Great site! I’ve been getting into Chinese Medicines recently. I was hoping for a Chinese version of borscht. I think I can start with borscht and try different common Chinese medicines each time I make it. I’m hoping someone has tips! I recently got A Spoonful of Ginger by Nina Simonds. It’s mostly about yin and yang foods. Not too bad. Can’t wait to try stuff out from it. Phoebe: A spoonful of Ginger is a good book. It has a good collection of recipes featuring common chinese herbs. Raymond Wong: Hi Phoebe - Thank you for setting up this site about chinese soups and why it is healthy to drink soup. Being an American Chinese, I always had chinese soup growing up but didn’t know why or what I was drinking. Thank you again for taking the time to explain the benefits of having soup and also for all those recipes... yummy for my tummy... Jasmine:You have a great website! I learnt a lot from it. I am now into soups and am thinking of preparing them in the morning so that I can have them ready at night when I come back from work. The Cuisinart slow cooker with timer is perfect. Can it be obtained in Singapore instead of through Amazon? Further, do you have any further tips on what I should do in the preparation for my dinner with the slow cooker? Would appreciate your advice. Tks Phoebe: I am not sure whether Cuisinart is available in Singapore. Sorry. If you are serious about using the slow cooker, you should get a good cookbook on slow cooker cooking. There should be quite a few at our public libraries. Try them out before buying your own. Tim Koh: thank you for a most helpful and interesting site especially when we’re so far away from home. I used to live in Singapore and I’m now living in Vancouver, BC. There are lots of new and inspiring soups here that they serve for free if you order up to 2-4 dishes in most Vancouver restaurants here. The soups here have a better quality maybe because of the stock and effort they put into making it. The other factor I guess is really the finest of ingredients that they use. Great job and Congrats for great effort! |
