Hi, I’m Nancy. I’m going to show you a very simple soup. Now this will take only a few minutes. I have
here chopped ginger, chopped onions, diced Chinese mushrooms which has been plopped in water for
about 10 minutes so it becomes very soft. Then I have here one cup of diced tomatoes, half cup of
Chinese chives. You have continental chives, you can also use that, sprig of coriander and this is the
Chinese loofah which i have cut up into little cubes. Here I have vegetable cubes for flavor or I can just
use soy sauce, salt or whatever you like. Now I’m using olive oil and I’m measuring so that you can see.
If you see the Chinese teaspoon, that is actually one tablespoon. I will use only half or less. Half a
tablespoon olive oil and any vegetable cooking oil that you like. Then when the pot is nice and hot, sorry
I have to use this, add in all your garlic, fry until a nice fragrance.
Add in your onions, half cup onion and half cup Chinese mushroom or shitake mushrooms. Coriander is
optional. I’ll just throw the whole thing in just for extra fragrance and flavor. What we’re going to do
next, I’ll just put in this vegetable cube. Just a vegetable cube, a big one that has no – and pure and
good. Fry till it’s nicely brown and add in your water which is actually one liter. It’s coming up to a boil.
Add in all the loofah because the loofah takes awhile to cook. You can cut it to any shape you like. You
can even shred it if you like but I like it big and chunky. This is how the soup gets a long time to simmer
so you like it to be nice and big and not small. So into cubes and next, you can add in your tomatoes
now, all of it and you can add the chives last. So it’s very very simple. It’s got a nice color as well. Now
let me tell you, in this simple soup, you know it’s full of nutrients.
There’s not only just one way of cooking. You see all the different things here, we can make thousands
of recipes from this vegetable. We can have a stir fry, we can have a soup, we can braise it but at the
moment, I’m only contributing to something that is vegetarian. So now, the loofah is not as hard as
before, halfway cooked. You can put in your garlic chives. If you can't get Chinese garlic chives,
continental chives will do. If you do not have these chives, you can also just use shallots or we call it
spring onions in some countries. In Australia we call it shallots so let me clear all these and then you can
season the soup further with soy sauce. Some people prefer salt. It’s all your own preference. I think
it’s good enough like that but you can add a dash of soy sauce if you like. Then at the end, you also can
put a few crushed red pepper or the Chinese like white pepper. So black or white pepper does not
matter. You can put a few black peppercorns in the soup. If you like-I’m picking up let’s say-it’s smelling
good, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, one dozen, that’s lucky. I lost one. One more. That’s 12 peppercorns in one liter of
water.
If you want it faster, that is only 3 minutes. If you want it faster as I said, half the kettle of water boiling
before you start cooking and this will cook in two minutes. It’s almost done. This is cooking on high,
speed up so that we can lower to simmer. When you are making soup, you normally lower to simmer to
bring out the best flavor in all the vegetable like the slow stew or a soup, a real soup, it’s slow cooking.
It’s ready, the soup is ready. Come on, I’m waiting to make you the five minutes soup. If the cubes are
smaller as I said, it’s already cooked, now I’m just breaking it to be more tender, that is all. It will take
another two minutes. It’s 6 minutes now from scratch when I started the flame so you can put it in two
minutes’ time everything is well cooked. It’s simple isn’t it? If you have any question, please write into
the column, I will say it’s comment, I’m most happy to answer your question to the best of my
knowledge. I thank you very much and while waiting for the soup to be nice and tender, I would like to
show you how it can be served.
Now you can serve the soup in a soup bowl like this. This is a Chinese soup bowl with a little saucer
underneath and this recipe will feed how many people-it will feed at least four to six people. For people
who like-who can take eggs, you can even beat one egg and drop it in. It’s so simple. So I’ll try to
contribute as much as I can as time goes on and I hope you’re happy to follow and you can be a fantastic
cook. There’s nothing difficult about cooking because these days you find a lot of people eating out,
takeaway when there’s a lot of not so nice things in the food. So to stay healthy, cook yourself. The
idea is cook it yourself and I will show you the simple way.