The Coughing Soup

After Sze Yi had been discharged from the pneumonia incident, she still had occasional coughing on and off. When it slowly get worse again, I started her on a course of chinese medicine from Beijing Tong Ren Tang. Well, that caused nearly a fortune, even though the consultation fee was just RM20. Anyway, I must give it credit for its effectiveness. Exactly 1 week after she took the medication, she stopped coughing.

But after sometime, her coughing came back, just this time not as bad as the last. I didn’t want to take any risk, so I quickly boiled this coughing soup. I got all the ingredients from Eu Yan Sang except for the pear which could be bought from Tesco or any market. I found this to be the simplest recipe and very easy to prepare too.

Recipe:
1. Peel the snow pear (or Ya Pear) and cut out the flesh in the middle to make a bowl-like container.

2. Put water into the pear and add the following in as well: chuan bei (either in powder or grain form), sweet & bitter almond and kei chi (wolfberry).

3. For sweetness, the medicine shop guy advise me not to put rock sugar since that would cause phlegm. Instead I was told to put honey dates.

I double-boiled the soup for ~3 hours with slow cooker (or 2 hours with automatic function) and it tasted really good. The most important thing was that it did help with the cough!

If you noticed, this was my version of a double-boiler since I don't have one :)

I had also tried another version where I just sliced the pear and add all the ingredients into ~3 bowls of water. I used 3 honey dates then. It's not as sweet as the above's method, but it's understandable because there was more water, so more people could drink from it.

And ever since then, every time I noticed Sze Yi started to have a mild cough, I started to boil this and it's really effective!