Choy Keuk/Kiam Chai Boey/Left Over Soup with Mustard Cabbage

My dad came from a rather big family so every time when there's a celebration or festival, we get to eat lots of food as grandma will dish out dishes after dishes of yummy goodness. Sometimes she cooked so much, there tend to be lots of left over. Later on, when grandma retired from cooking duties for these events, we will dine in restaurants and will often have left over too. What do grandma do with these left over? She will dump all of these into a huge pot and boil it with kai-choy (mustard cabbage) and turned it into this soul warming goodness that we called Choy Keuk (Cantonese) or Kiam Chai Boey (Hokkien). You won't believe that a melting pot of mixed flavors can be so good!

Though I love this dish but I did not know how to cook this dish until I moved here! My hubby loved this dish so much that I decided to learn how to cook it! I tried to recollect my memories of how to prepare this dish after watching grandma and my sis-in-law cooking it. Grandma is a Cantonese and sis-in-law is Hokkien so I sort of merged the two together and finding the taste that best suited us. It is so easy and so appetising!

The only thing is, we hardly have much left over! Then I learned from some cooking groups that I can actually cook it from scratch without needing much left over dishes but rather buying left over roasted meat instead! Yes, the flavors from roasted meat (siew yuk or roasted pork, roasted duck and roasted pork bones) is the perfect ingredient. I will usually go to the Chinese restaurants to buy duck heads (you won't believe it but these are the flavor bomb!) and roasted pork bones. These are not very costly and they are the best to create the base for the soup. If you have left over pork maw soup, it is the best as the soup base to add extra flavors.

Why only use mustard cabbage for this dish? Apparently this is the only vegetable that can hold its shape even after long period of boiling. However, the Chinese's belief that these mustard cabbage is on the cooling side so try not to eat too much else it may cause joint pain. In other cases, eating too much of this soup might cause bloating. 

Ingredients

• 5 pcs        Roasted duck heads (together with neck)
• 500g        Roasted pork bones
• 1 pc         Roasted pork knuckle
• 3              Onions - quartered
• 6 stalks    Lemongrass - smashed
• 10            Dried chilies - deseeded
• 10            Dried assam Gelugor slices - washed
• 1 bulb      Garlic - slightly smashed
• 2" knob   Ginger - slightly smashed
• 2              Tomatoes - quartered
• 2 sticks    Carrots - cut chunks
• 2 heads    Mustard cabbage/Kai choy (separate the thick parts from the leafy parts)
• 5L            Water/Soup stock
• 2-3 tbsp   Cooking oil
• Salt to taste
• Whatever left over meat dishes you have (not fish)

Methods

1. Heat oil in a deep soup pot (I used pressure cooker) and fry onions, lemongrass, ginger, garlic, dried chilies and assam slices till slightly brown and aromatic. 
2. Pour in water or soup stock and boil till bubbling, add in the duck heads, roasted bones and pork knuckle. Boil for an hour or half and hour if using pressure cooker. This is to extract the flavors from the roasted meat.
3. Fish out the beak part of the duck heads (if you don't want to eat broken up pieces of them!). Add in carrots and tomatoes and let it continue to boil for 15 mins.
4. Put in the thicker parts of the mustard cabbage and let it boil for 15 minutes before putting the leafy parts in. 
5. Season with salt before serving. Best to leave it over night for the mustard cabbage to soak in the flavors.