Amazing tea and soup gift ideas for Christmas!
It’s that time of year again! It’s Christmas!
And I’m preparing early this year because my gifts will take some time to make.
This year, I’ve opted for 2 kinds of giving from The Chinese Soup Lady!
- Frozen soup packs customized to the winter weather. You can follow this post on creating either frozen cooked soup (takes 5 minutes to reheat) or frozen raw ingredients (takes about an hour to cook in the rice cooker)
- Customized Chinese herbal tea concentrates (post coming soon)! The latest one I made is a Clementine warming healing herbal tea with clementine slices, sliced ginger, honey, and a sprinkle of salt. Allow this to marinate in the fridge for a week and then scoop out 2 tablespoons and add hot water for a ready-to-serve delicious Chinese herbal tea!
Other ideas:
- Customized and homemade dry herbal teas (use these super cute and small recyclable and environmentally friendly tea bags). A great combination is a simple dried red dates, dried longans, and cinnamon bark tea.
- Pre-mixed teas with Chinese herbs in portable tea bags (great for traveling or if you’re at the office!). An example would be a pu’er with dried chrysanthemum flowers.
The art and gift of pre-made frozen Chinese soup packs has been a game changing discovery for me!
I now make this in bulk, using economies of scale on batch ingredients and time and effort. And I’ve saved so much energy and time on having soup for dinner if I’m working or we have a busy day! And, the kids can make it for me!
Use either a rice cooker (although some experimentation may need to happen depending on the brand), instapot, or pressure cooker! The stove top works as well, just be careful if your kids are doing it!
Equipment you may need:
These are super cute 16 oz top color mason jars (which I also use for canning preserved kumquats) and are perfect for 4 clementines to fit inside!
My go-to 1.5 quart glass mixing bowl. I use it for baking, mixing ingredients, making salads, storing cut ingredients before adding them to soup! These are really quite diverse!
This wet and dry food sealer is the key equipment to making both wet soup packs and dried ready-to-cook Chinese soup packs! Seriously, a must have in the kitchen!
I buy these pre-sealed and cut sealer bags and have a stash at home (all the time). I find these pre-sealed ones on one side are more stable (versus the ones that come in a roll).
0 Comments