Old cucumber soup

Haze has persisted to hang around Singapore since last Tuesday. It's kind of true what people said, it looks like stock market and the movement is very volatile. Seems like all in Singapore keep checking the figure every hours (can feel the excitement of watching the stock market).

Welcoming my weekend, haze firmly positioned itself in figure above 300 in the morning. I decided to cook my curry stock, but when I read one post from my friend at facebook, it mentioned for us to better avoid the spicy kind of foods. So I told hubby and changed my mind, looked for other recipes and found the cucumber soup. It's been long time I wanted to try cooking this. So, after having our bfast, we went down to buy flowers (for praying on 15th day of the lunar month) at wet market and my ingredients for this cooling soup.

Ingredients :
Old cucumber
Carrots
Pork ribs
Chicken breasts (since my sis didn't take any pork)
Dried scallops
Dried cuttlefish (didn't manage to find one, so I skipped this)
Red dates (slicing a bit)
Salt
Sugar
Water

I also added in : chopped garlics, shallots, and wolfberries (not cooling herbs)

How to cook :
1. Scrub the old cucumber's skin clean and cut it in pieces. Take out the seeds.
2. Marinate the chicken and keep it in the fridge while waiting for others to be done.
3. Blanch the pork ribs in boiling water for few minutes, then drain them and set aside.
4. In a soup pot, add in all the ingredients. Water, cucumber chunks, pork ribs, marinated chicken, chopped shallots and garlics, carrots, dried scallops, and red dates. After 10minutes, add in salt and sugar with own's taste preferences (I added the wolfberries around 20minutes later). Boiled it for about 45mins to 1 hour.

The cooking is easy, just spent more time in preparation. Enjoy! :)