Simple Chicken herbal soup

This dish can be consume almost every other day unless you find it boring. It is a simple Chicken herbal soup with only 3 Chinese herb ingredients, which is Solomon's seal, wolfberries and Chinese Yam. It is nutritional and you can consume the meat of the chicken as well. This soup can be made either from chicken or lean pork meat as well; it is entirely up to your preferences. I choose to cook with a skinless chicken and it must be cut up to at least 4 big pieces, well this is also up to your preferences. You can leave the whole chick in it and let it cook as well. If using pork, it is a tradition that to cut the lean meat in big chunks rather than slice it thin, and normally, I do not consume the meat at all and only drink the soup as all the nutrition is already in the soup.

Simple Chicken Herbal soup (serves 4)

1 about 900g     Whole Chicken

or 

600g                  Lean pork

15g                    Solomon's seal 玉竹-Yuk Chuk

15g                    Chinese yam 山藥-Shan Yau
2 tbsp                Wolfberries 枸杞子-Gei Zhi

1 litre                 Water

1tsp                   Salt (optional)

1. Rinse the herbs properly.
2. Remove the excess fat in the meat if necessary, you do not want your soup to be full with oil later.Clean the meat by rubbing some salt then rinse it off after a few minutes. This adds some taste to the meat so you do not need to add salt later in the soup.
3. Combine all ingredients in a pot and simmer for about an hour.
4. Please remember to wait till the water boil first before you put in the ingredients.

Alternatively, I scald the meat first with hot water before I add it into the soup as this method will reduce the fatty oil in the soup.