The Spring Festival is the most grand festival of the Chinese nation, a time of "good food and drink" for Chinese people. Many people experience symptoms like "heatiness" and loss of appetite from eating too much meat and greasy food. During this time, it's very suitable to pair meals with some food that reduces grease and "heatiness," such as winter melon, which is very beneficial to health.
Dried Scallop and Winter Melon Soup
Winter melon is a vegetable that is both medicinal and edible, with various health benefits. Traditional Chinese Medicine believes that winter melon has a sweet, light flavor and a cool nature, targeting the lung, large intestine, small intestine, and bladder meridians. It has many functions, including moistening the lungs and promoting body fluids, transforming phlegm and quenching thirst, promoting urination and reducing swelling, clearing heat and dispelling summer heat, and detoxifying and expelling pus. It can also be used to treat summer heat, thirst, phlegm-heat coughing, edema, beriberi, bloating, diabetes, acne, facial blemishes, rectal prolapse, hemorrhoids, and can counteract the toxins from fish and alcohol. Furthermore, winter melon can protect the kidneys. Winter melon juice and its extracts can increase urine output. Folk remedies use a decoction of winter melon peel and broad beans boiled in water, with the dregs removed, to treat edema from kidney disease and heart disease.
During the Spring Festival, the best way to eat winter melon is to stew it with spinach or tremella into a soup. For the Winter Melon and Spinach Soup, you will need 300g of winter melon, 200g of spinach, 30g of lamb, and appropriate amounts of ginger and scallions. Peel and wash the winter melon, wash and chop the spinach, and thinly slice the lamb. Heat oil in a wok over a flame, add the scallions and lamb slices and stir-fry. Add the scallion sections, ginger slices, spinach, and winter melon cubes, stir-fry a few times, add broth, and bring to a boil for about 10 minutes. Add salt, soy sauce, and MSG. Finally, pour in a starch slurry and mix until thickened. This soup not only helps to reduce dryness and "heatiness" but also has the effects of tonifying deficiency, reducing swelling, aiding weight loss, and strengthening the body. The Winter Melon and Tremella Soup is also very simple to make. Take 250g of winter melon and 30g of tremella. Peel and slice the winter melon; soak the tremella in water until soft, then wash it. Heat oil in a pot over a flame, add the winter melon and stir-fry briefly. Add broth and salt, and when the winter melon is almost cooked, add the tremella, MSG, and rice wine to adjust the flavor and it is ready to eat. This soup has the effects of clearing heat, promoting body fluids, and promoting urination to reduce swelling. It is suitable for patients with hypertension, heart disease, or edema from nephritis.
It is worth noting that winter melon has a cool nature, so people with a weak spleen and stomach, or kidney deficiency, should not consume it in large quantities.
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