Turtle soup is highly recommended by Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as the best possible medicine to revive failing kidneys. The kidneys control every organ in the body, especially the heart and the pancreas. Weak kidneys can cause high blood pressure, rapid heart rate, and Type II diabetes. When your kidneys are completely failing, you have two choices: turtle soup or a kidney transplant.
To make turtle soup, you will need a huge stainless steel pot, big enough to hold a ceramic pot placed inside it. You can buy these pots at a Chinese market. In Sacramento, CA you can buy the pots, along with all the ingredients for the soup, including a live turtle, at Welco Supermarket. The clerk at the market will chop the live turtle into pieces with a huge cleaver, and then package it up so that you don’t have to look at it.
It will take a minimum of two days to prepare and cook the soup. First, you start by making a broth from a whole chicken and some Chinese herbs. You will need a third pot for the broth. The chicken and the herbs must cook for a minimum of 8 hours. Then you put the turtle, shell and all, inside the ceramic pot and cover the turtle with the chicken broth.
Place the ceramic pot, filled with the turtle and the broth, inside the stainless steel pot and fill the stainless steel pot up to within one inch of the top of the ceramic pot. The turtle soup must cook for a minimum of 12 hours, but longer cooking is better. After a few hours of cooking, you can remove the ceramic pot and place the turtle soup inside your refrigerator, then continue cooking it the next day, if you do not want to stay up all night watching the soup.
Recipe for Turtle Soup
Make a broth from these ingredients:
1. One ounce Dioscorea (Shen Yao)
2. One and a half ounces Radix Astragali (Huang Qi)
3. One and a half ounces Codonopsis Pilosula (Dang Shen)
4. One half ounce Medlar (Qi Zhi)
5. 8 dried Chinese dates
6. One whole (dead) chicken with the feathers and feet removed. Include the liver, heart, gizzard and neck in the broth.
When the broth is done, remove the chicken meat and the bones, but not the herbs.
Put the chopped up turtle (including the shell) into the ceramic pot and fill the pot, up to one inch from the top, with the chicken broth.
Place a towel or some chop sticks on the bottom of the stainless steel pot so that the ceramic pot does not touch the bottom of the stainless steel pot.
Pour water into the stainless steel pot, and allow the soup to simmer inside the ceramic pot for 12 hours at least. Do not allow the water in the stainless steel pot to get into the ceramic pot, which has a small hole in the lid. Cover the stainless steel pot with a tight-fitting lid and allow the soup to simmer for up to 7 days.
To serve the soup, remove the pieces of turtle shell. You may also remove the turtle meat. You do not have to eat the turtle meat, as all of the medicinal properties will be in the broth. The amount of broth that you are required to drink depends on how much you boil it down. Normally, about 12 ounces of broth will be enough to have a good effect on your kidneys.
Turtle soup can be eaten once a month until your kidneys recover. For people who don’t have weak kidneys, the soup can be eaten once a year to maintain good health.
How will you know if your kidneys have improved, after you have eaten the soup? A TCM doctor can tell you how well your kidneys are working. When your kidneys are working the way they should, you will have not have to get up at night to go to the bathroom, and you will have no tell-tale symptoms of failing kidneys, like dry mouth. You will have renewed energy and your blood pressure, and blood sugar, will be normal.
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This is simply not believable.
Comment by budly — May 11, 2012 @ 1:11 am
How do you know unless you try it? You’re probably too young to need it. Furtherglory, keep writing your personal health blogs, I find them very interesting. But I doubt I will go to the trouble to make the turtle soup. Have you made it? How does it taste? Not that taste is it’s purpose.
Comment by Sceptic — May 11, 2012 @ 8:52 am
I have made the turtle soup twice. The first time I made it for myself and other family members. Immediately after eating the soup, I no longer had “bounding pulse” or “strong pulse” as the TCM doctors call it. “Bounding pulse” is a medical condition in which the heart seems to be beating too strongly. This will cause the heart muscle to enlarge and eventually lead to congestive heart failure. TCM doctors say that “strong pulse” is caused by the kidneys being too weak to regulate the heart beat properly. Weak kidneys also cause episodes of rapid heart beat, aka tachycardia, which I no longer have, after eating the soup.
The second time, I made the soup for a friend who paid me a lot of money to make the soup for her because she didn’t want to deal with the turtle. This time I boiled the soup down so that she would not have to eat so much of it. I strained the soup, so that she would not have to eat the turtle meat. She drank 12 ounces of the broth and before she got up from the table, she announced that she could feel a tingling in her kidneys. She took the rest of the soup home with her to freeze, so she can have some once a month. This friend is only 50 years old, but the TCM doctor told her that she has the kidneys of a much older person. She was suffering from dry mouth and exhaustion which are sure signs of weak kidneys. She was lucky that she had me to diagnose her condition correctly and tell her about the turtle soup cure.
The soup doesn’t taste bad at all. Keep in mind that it is made with chicken broth and herbs, so the flavor is good. If you cook the soup for 24 hours, which I did, the turtle meat disintegrates into tiny pieces. I strained it through a sieve so that even these tiny pieces were not in the soup, and my friend could just pretend that it was chicken soup. She said that it tasted like gravy made with chicken broth.
Comment by furtherglory — May 11, 2012 @ 11:34 am
I served the soup with celery sticks and raw apple slices. Apples and celery are both good for the kidneys. In case someone doesn’t like the taste of the soup, it is good to have some other food to kill the taste. I also served pickles, but my friend didn’t need pickles to kill the taste of the soup, since she liked the soup and said it tasted good.
Comment by furtherglory — May 11, 2012 @ 11:44 am
Interesting. I was given a slighty different recipe by my Chinese doctor which takes me about 4 hours to prep but I do it with a live turtle. I was prescribed this after chemo-radiation failed to stop my cancer. 6 weeks later, I’m feeling stronger and more active than I have been in a long time. Of course, turtle soup isn’t the only thing I’m doing, but it is a daily regimen.
Comment by Yu — July 16, 2012 @ 8:35 am
Do you mean that you started by taking a live turtle and dropping it into a pot of hot water? I made the soup by purchasing a live turtle, which a Chinese woman in the store then killed by chopping it into pieces with a large cleaver. The important thing is to cook the shell, along with the turtle meat, in the soup. I think that longer cooking would bring out more of the medicinal ingredients in the turtle shell.
According to Western alternative medicine, fruits such as strawberries, blueberries, and tomatoes will kill cancer. Also, Bok Choy is supposed to help cure cancer. Fruits and vegetables should be part of anyone’s daily regimen.
Comment by furtherglory — July 16, 2012 @ 12:11 pm