Like most things, this started serendipitously. We blended up some tomatoes for an impromptu hotpot, and because my dad opened a couple of cans of abalone, I poured the abalone brine into the hotpot, which made this hotpot broth into something quite incredible. We can't always be eating abalone, but the good news is it tastes really good with chicken broth too. When I visited the US in October last year, I brought back with me several...

It’s been a busy few weeks that I'd spent studying, and I barely left the house. It's also the flu season, and I’ve been wrestling with back-to-back colds. I was craving something rich, soupy and warm, and more importantly, something to distract me from my impending examinations. Beef shins appear only sporadically in my area, and so when they appeared one day behind the grocer’s meat section, I bought back several hunks. Both ends of the beef shins...