Ham, Shrimp & Winter Melon Soup

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This is express comfort food. Easy, economical and relatively healthy. We cook some version of this soup in our household at least twice a year. A more detailed recipe was posted a couple of years ago, here, but even this version is slightly different. From the freezer into the soup pot went PHP60-70 worth of ham bones. Cover with water, add a chopped onion and some peppercorns and boil for some 30-40 minutes. You can go back to your computer and write a quick post for your food blog while this is gurgling away. Then strain the soup to remove bones and solids and put it back in the soup pot and place it over high heat…

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Add some peeled and cubed kundol or winter melon and let that boil for a few minutes, throw in some baby shrimp, peeled or unpeeled, whatever you have handy. Add some sliced strips of ham, in this case the cheaper “ham bits” from oursuki Majestic ham vendor, and let this boil another few minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. In this version, I added some chopped greens or bok choy and it was ready to serve. A bowl of this soup chockfull of “laman” or “stuff” and some steamed rice, and it’s simple lunchtime bliss. The flavorful ham broth is an excellent base, and it tastes like you worked on it for hours. The shrimp adds sweetness and softness to the bite. The ham provides the salty sweet hit of flavor, and the winter melon, a mushy flavorless sponge that sucks up the broth. The greens add color and nutrition, not to mention roughage to help push this through your plumbing. :)

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11 Responses

  1. MM, your soup looks yummy, lots of laman, such is a good use for kundol, in season this time of the year and good for roughage as you say. If you have plenty of this melon, you can also make them into candied kundol. Thank you.

  2. yum, i could use some of that right about now! cold, wet weekend here in the east coast! perhaps i can adopt that recipe for the cushaw squash we harvested from our backyard garden!

  3. Quite a hearty looking soup! Reminds me of the Pancit Molo our beloved cook/friend made for our entire clan every New Year when we still living in the Philippines. My Mom used to make Chinese Ham for Christmas and we would use the bone and the scraps as soup base and laman for the pancit molo. We all helped wrap the molo by hand – took us a couple of days at least because we had an army to feed. It was worth all the effort though.

    Thanks very much for creating and maintaining this most excellent website. I just discovered it yesterday and I am thoroughly impressed! I’ve been trying to read as many past blogs as I can. It’s so much fun to find so many foodies who share a similar interest and passion in Pinoy/Tsinoy/Regional/Overseas cooking and baking.

    Hope BettyQ is around: Thanks very much for your recipes! Do you teach? I would love to be your student. I volunteer to word process your recipes for you to share with MM and his fans =). We can even include photos if you like.

    Looking forward to all our future posts (and reading archived posts).

  4. My lunched is sinigang na Hipon with arabong sili at okra. Our cook is a pinoy and our camp much better than palacio del gobernador. d ako nahohomesick.heheheh

  5. i’ve always wondered what winder melon was. kundol pala! i always learn something new everytime i read your blog mm. thanks!

  6. If I don’t have kundol, I use the thick white part of a watermelon, peeled of course of the green skin, cubed in large chunks and stored in the freezer for when a rainy day comes to throw in my tinola or a similar soup as posted here.

    Anong say mo, Betty Q?

  7. Connie/E that is so clever….my p. grandma used to pickle the watermelon rind and then made soup with them when they were ready…missed those…unfortunately, none of us learned that ‘recipe’ from her…..kundol reminds me of kundol hopia, too….yummy! Betty, do you know how to make those hopia?

  8. I am impressed, Doc!….VERY RESOURCEFUL!!!

    Hey, Doc…since you are alreadfy in Palawan…try subbing the winter melon with ripe PAPAYA….but not the soft , mushy one…ripe but still firm. It adds a bit of sweeteness to the soup!

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