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One of the beauties of living in Hong Kong....apart from...
- HK$10 wonton noodle
- Coffee shop whole day breakfasts
- In some places, food being smashed on your table delivered to you within seconds after you uttered your orders
- HK$18 BBQ pork lunch boxes
...is Chinese Soup in A Pack
The locals drink their Chinese soup religiously.
Each soup has its own health benefits such as...as quoted the locals:
- good for skin
- good for the heart
- good for heat
- good for cold
- good for health
good good good...I wonder if they have some soups that's good for love/good for career/good for the economy?
My knowledge about Chinese soup is...nonexistent.
I don't know which ingredient goes with what, and I don't know which soup is good for what.
I might have been drinking soup which is "good for gentlemen"...since I seem to have grown quite a lot of moustache these days. Oppps. (No, Rita. Don't blame it on the soup. You've had moustache since...like..forever)
Anyway, based on my Chinese soup related cluelessness, soup in a pack is my best bet.
Last weekend I've chosen...
Pumpkin, Carrot and Corn Soup Pack
It's a Chinese soup combo that I haven't seen before, and despite the persistent scorching heat, autumn is coming, so something with pumpkin sounds perfect.
I just grabbed a pack, it costs HK$18.50 (around USD2.3), it has all the necessary ingredients for the soup. I've added another pack of pork tenderloin too.
...and it doesn't get easier than this.
Simply dump everything into a pot (an impatient bitch that I am, I used a pressure cooker ^_^), add boiling water, bring to boil and simmer for about 1 hour.
Since I use a pressure cooker, I could've been drinking a bowl of soup after just 15 minutes.
But I want everything richer, sweeter, thicker, and tender, so I cooked my soup for 25 minutes. For pressure cooking vegetables, that's like...forever!
See my darling cooker blowing off steams?
That promises deliciousness.
...wow!
The soup is naturally sweet from all the sweet ingredients with a touch of meatiness from the pork tenderloin, I simply added a bit of salt to make everything perfectly balanced.
Yum!...and the meat? Melt-in-your-mouth tender.
Now back to the most important issue again. Does anyone know any soup that can make me richer, slimmer, prettier, and also smarter?
(Note to self: Chinese soups can only do so much, not the impossible)
Carrots. Ugh.
Until recently, I felt like I've had more than enough carrot in my life.
I was born shortsighted (my eyes, not my mentality hehe). My mom and I didn't know this until after I started primary school, she saw me squinting at everything. We went to a ophthalmologist. The doctor said I could avoid a pair of glasses (waaaat?? and squint forever?), he prescribed some pills and advised my mom to ensure that I have regular intake of vitamin A, for example...haha, from carrots.
My mom, a perfectionist that she is, wouldn't do anything by half measures. She really ensured that I was given a full large glass of freshly squeezed carrot juice daily. In Starbucks lingo, it would've been at least a grande, and for an 8 year old, that's A LOT! If there was a limit of carrot intake for kids, I exceeded that by a zillion buckets.
Did I enjoy my daily carrot juice?
Ugh.
You know freshly squeezed carrot juice has certain scent and flavor, which normally prompted kids to auto-hate it in an equal amount to how we hated our homeworks?
I hated, hated, hated the juice. It was not even disguised with citrus or anything (carrots also kinda lost its weirdness once cooked)...it was 100% pure carrot juice. I dreaded the time I had to drink my juice (around 3 pm every day), contemplated throwing the juice out and 1001 other tricks, but fearing blindness (I was such a goodie two shoes, and a giant fool), I forced it down my throat every single time. Did it work? Maybe...my shortsightedness was stable until I was about 13 and started wearing glasses. My glasses got thicker and thicker every year until I had to wear contact lenses.
Needless to say, I developed a deep and intense hatred towards carrots, which lasted until my first bite of carrot cake in Australia.
The idea of a carrot cake sent shivers down my spine.
Weird, stinky, yucky, orange-brown colored cake. Ew. It must have involved some kind of dare to get me to take my first bite. After that first bite, all my carrot hatred was resolved. Granted that I won't go back to gulping glasses or carrot juice...but I use a lot of carrots these days, and I even tried baking my own carrot cake, and it was yummy enough for me to do another one with....chocolate.
Look at this...
Don't we kinda wanna dip ourselves into this tub of chocolatey goodness?
...and once it's baked..
...soft, moist, very chocolatey, without any trace of carrotness in it.
Chocolate Carrot Cake
Recipe
(adapted from here , halved, omitted topping, reduced sugar, added cocoa powder and semisweet chocolate chips)
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 cup and 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 & 1/2 cups grated carrots
- a couple handfuls of semisweet chocolate chips
- chocolate jimmies (optional, as I didn't make any toppings ^_^)
Preheat oven to 180C/350F, lightly grease a cake pan (I used a loaf pan). Place eggs, sugar and vanilla in a mixing bowl. Mix flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cocoa powder in another bowl. Beat eggs, sugar and vanilla mixture until pale, add flour mix and beat until well mixed (I used an electric mixer), add grated carrots, mix well. Pour half of the batter into your cake pan, scatter the chocolate chips and top with the rest of the batter. Scatter some chocolate jimmies on top (optional), bake for about 30-40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Let cool in the oven for 10 minutes, and turn onto a wire rack to cool completely (I let it cool in the pan :p).
I will be baking this moist chocolatey goodness quite often ;)
How's my shortsightedness now? I had it lasered a couple of years ago (I hated contact lenses as much as carrot juice ^_^).