Preserved vegetable soup 四川菜汤

I found this recipe on the My taste, his taste blog. Many months ago I bought some Chinese preserved vegetables but didn't find the time to use the vegetables. This soup seemed pretty straightforward. Before you can use the vegetables soak them in water for half an hour and rinse. Cut into 1 cm pieces and set aside. The vegetables are Chinese mustard greens, or jiè cài (芥菜) in Mandarin and gai choy in Cantonese. Pickled they are called haam choy. 四川菜汤 means: Sichuan (四川) vegetable (菜) soup (汤).

The other vegetables you need are a couple of tomatoes, 2 to 3 carrots and a red or green chili. For meat pork spare ribs are perfect. First cook the spare ribs for a minute in boiling water, drain and rinse. Cut the spare ribs in separate pieces. See below.

Add 2 liters water to a pot, add the preserved vegetable, carrots and tomatoes and boil. Add the ribs and simmer for half an hour. Add the chili and crushed white pepper (black will do as well) and simmer for another half hour. Since the preserved vegetables are salty wait until the last moment to adjust for salt.

You can keep this soup in the fridge for many days.