Cabbage Stock

This is the newest stock that I've used in cooking Alicia's porridge. Now that I'm cooking two meals of porridge a day for Alicia, I have to try out a different flavour for the second meal of porridge because the still staunchly purist Alicia eats her porridge without other ingredients. Initially I was using the corn and carrot soup (I use chicken bones and pork ribs as base for almost all my soups including alicia's stocks) for lunch and the lotus root and kudzu soup to cook dinner. However since I'm not sure if the latter stock can be consumed every day by a toddler, I decided to play safe and go with something more neutral like cabbage. Cabbage, unlike Chinese cabbage, is not liang (cooling) so it can be consumed daily. When my mum cooks this soup for adult consumption (we add a lot more other stuff in our own soups) during Chinese New Year, it is so wonderfully satisfying. Since this is for Alicia, I decided to go with the usual stock ingredients I use for her in her corn and carrot stock, which is just chicken bones and pork ribs. No dried scallops, dried shrimps, dried cuttlefish for her... :D

Alicia didn't show particular liking for the porridge. But neither did she dislike it. She ate about her usual portion so I guess that's ok? :)

Cabbage Stock

Ingredients:

• 1/4 Korean cabbage (you can use other types of cabbage. I happened to find this in the wet market that day)
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 250-300g pork ribs
• 1 chicken carcass or 3 chicken breast bones
• 1.5-2L of water

Method:

1. Wash and clean the chicken bones and pork ribs. Blanch them.
2. Put all the ingredients except the cabbage in to boil.
3. Once the soup boils, add in the cabbage.
4. Once it boils again, simmer on low heat for 5hours. All the taste of the cabbage would be out in the soup by then. This is purely for stock purposes so if you are making this soup for adults, you will only put in the cabbage about an hour or so before serving so that the cabbage isn't totally tasteless!
5. Strain the stock and pack into suitable portions after it cools.