Chicken Feet Peanut Soup (花生鸡脚汤)

There's a reader requesting for Chicken Feet Peanut Soup (花生鸡脚汤) the other day. I cooked this 2 weeks ago, but I don't have the time to write about it.

This is a common soup during my childhood time. My deceased aunt always cook this for me when I was small. But no more now. Whenever I wanna drink this soup, I will have to cook it myself.

The ingredients are easily available. You could get chicken feet from wet market or even supermarket too. No need to elaborate further. But for the conch (Sea snails), it might looks not common to some people.

When you want to cook this soup, please be generous on the chicken feet. If you are stingy, thinking that you wants a pot of nice soup by just adding 5 pairs chicken feets for 2.2L water, forget it. You want nice soup, you will have to be generous.

1 pack of chicken feet (5 pairs) cost only S$1.00 at the wet market. Put more chicken feet, and you will get really collagen-rich and thick soup.

Ingredients

• 200g Raw Peanut 花生
• 10 pairs Chicken Feet 鸡脚
• 200g Pork Ribs 排骨
• 5pcs Dried Conch (Sea Snails) 海螺肉
• 2.2L Water
• Salt to taste

Note : Please go ahead and substitute the Conch into dried octopus or dried cuttlefish. It would taste even better. Read on, and I'll tell you why I used Conch for this soup.

Method

1. Remove peanut skin by rubbing it hard with each other. The reason is because I would prefer my soup to have a clearer broth. Don't bother if you are lazy. It's just that peanut skins gives your soup darker color. That's all. Pre-soak the peanuts overnight (or at least 5 hours) before use.
2. Rinse pork ribs, scald in boiling water for awhile, remove and rinse.
3. Rinse chicken feet, check if all toe nails from the feet are removed. Cut away any bad part (if any). Parboil the chicken feet for 5mins, remove and rinse. 
4. Pre-soak dried conch (sea snails) for at least 2 days. This is to ensure the conch is really soft enough to use.
5. If you are using dried octopus or cuttlefish, wash and snip them into smaller pieces.
6. In a soup pot, add pork ribs, peanut,conch and water. Bring to a boil for 10mins. And then, add chicken feet. Boil another 10mins again. Then reduce heat and simmer the soup over low heat for 4 hours, until the peanut turns really soft.
7. Your soup will definitely have the Umph! after 4 hours! Woohoo!!! Remember to add salt to taste before serve.

This is one of the way to remove peanut skin by rubbing them hard. You could see the dark color of the peanut water. If you didn't pre-soak your peanut and wash them, these water is going to be in your soup.

Parboil your chicken feet is a must. This is to ensure that your chicken feet soup has nicer broth.

I'm not supposed to use conch for this soup actually. But my mother-in-law pre-soaked a few pieces of conch and she told me she don't know what to do with it. When she knew I wanna cook soup, she ask me to use conch instead of the usual dried cuttlefish / octopus. Although I knew that conch will not gives this soup really good seafood taste, but then, I'll just use it.

I dig out one of my nutritional cookbook, and realized that conch is quite nutritious. And the book says - It is warm in nature and taste bittersweet, living inbetween the rocks in the shallow sea-bed. It is rich in Vitamin A, protein, iron and calcium, amino acid and trace elements. It treats conjunctivitis 红眼症, jaundice 黄疸, athelete's foot hemorrhoids 脚气 Piles 痔疮 and so on.

Not bad eh? Hahaha...

See my soup again. It has nice and clear broth. That is because I soak and wash my peanut several times. Don't judge the soup by it's pale look. This soup is reall really thick and nice. How thick it would be? Take a bowl of soup and put it in the fridge, it will turn jelly. Haha... You could imagine now?

This is a super collagen soup. My grandma once told me that this really good for complexion and knees cartilage problem. This is when you hear ’squeaky’ noise if you walked long distance or some seniors who have weak knees.

So, this is another beauty soup. Please drink more. Haha...