Soup for the Soul

This is the soup that Pei Chin made for me.

I'm so happy I could cry.

How would I have known that, 14,000km away from home and Mom, I would have Lian Ou Tang to drink?

My favorite - Lotus Root soup, with groundnuts and red dates in pork broth, cooked from scratch with the freshest ingredients and simmered over the stove for hours and hours.

mmm.....It has an aroma so light and fragrant, and a taste so sweet and surreal it transports me back to my mom's kitchen in our HDB flat in Telok Blangah, where my mom has made a potful and is bringing me a bowl of wholesome, nutritious soup just like this one.


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Soup soup!! I am bouncing around waiting for the soup to boil over the fire.

I am grinning and skipping all over the living room waiting to taste my soup.

Sweetie!!! come take a photo of my soup!! I want to tell everyone I had Lian Ou Tang!!!

DO YOU WANT SOME SOUP??! You can try some!! IT'S REALLY REALLY YUMMY!!! :D

bounce bounce bounce.


The hubs looks into the pot and refused to be stirred by my enthusiasm.

As gently as he could, he turns down 3 times my loud ballistic offers for him to try a spoonful of wholesome nutritious soup.

My mother-in-law, who was visiting from New York, bless her kind-hometown-Buffalo-roastbeef-and-baked-potatoes ol' soul, tries not to screw her nose at the sight of my steaming hot bowl of pork bones and tuberous roots.


I don't take their rejections personally; I am too dizzy with delight to be a dampened spirit, and unabashedly besotted with gluttony over my bowl of soup, looking like I was possessed by the Tasmanian Devil himself.


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Home-cooked soup, especially soup this good, is nourishment for the homesick soul.

Happy 42nd Birthday to Singapore :)