Soup Ocean

In our household, there are no better comfort food than a bowl of warm Chinese soup. My son loves soup. He needs to have soup at each meal. It brings comfort to me that my little boy still prefers Chinese thin soup versus thick and hearty American can soup. This assures me at least for now, that our culture is still in tact.
A thick bowl of soup is when a spoon is able to stand on it's own when you sink it in to the bowl. There is no way you can do that with a bowl of Chinese soup. The first sentence, my dad used to tell us when we begin each meal is "Yum Tong ah" which means drink the soup. It's almost customary for us to have the soup first then the actual meal. It is meant to wet or marinate our taste buds first prior to the actual meal. At my dinner table now days, I don't even have to tell my little guy, "Yum Tong ah" because even before I say that, the soup is gone.
My hope is for him not to outgrow this habit because as he gets older, sooner or later he is going to find out the ingredients used to make these soup!(Pig brain, Intestines,Chicken feet, mushroom, fish heads, Fish eyeballs and etc. Remember the scene from Indiana Jones when he was at the Indian Village where the eyeballs float up from the soup they were having?) By then, he may not even allowed me to utter the words "Yum Tong ah" but instead he would say "Campbell please...!!!"


-M