Ah, Mung Bean Soup ç¶ è±†æ¹¯. One of my favorite Summer treats. Sweet, refreshing. I used to think that it took all day to prepare. But a little search on the Internet I found incredibly fast and simple way to cook this. I can’t believe it. I am elated. I can make this childhood favorite myself. Anytime. And there is a big pot just chilling in the fridge already. 
Here’s how it’s done. Get a packet of mung beans from an Asian market. Chinese markets should have this well stocked. You usually get about 2½ cups of them in one packet. Soak them in cold water for an hour before using them. (Keep a few soaking and they will quickly grow into bean sprouts. Put them on wet cotton and they will continue to grow. Great fun for kids.) Rinse it a couple of times after soaking. Then, prepare the sugar water. Just heat water and add sugar. Any sugar will do. I used brown rock sugar. The cooked mung beans will increase in size 3 to 4 times. Make enough sugar water to cover the beans when they are added. And make it just a little sweeter than you’d like. You will be adding the unsweetened beans to it.
Set aside the prepared sugar water. Cook the beans the same way you cook steam rice. I used a rice cooker, which made it super easy. After the beans are cooked, transfer them to the pot with the sugar water. Bring to a boil. Turn off heat and cover for a short time until the beans pop open. Uncover and let cool, then move it into the refrigerator. Serve chilled! Yum!
Mung beans have medicinal properties. It is cooling, it detoxifies. And I just found out today that it even reduces fat! I gotta see if that’s true! 
Here’s some info I found:
From ITM Online:
Phaeseolus (ludou; mung bean), another legume, is mentioned in the Chinese-English Manual of Commonly Used Herbs in Traditional Chinese Medicine as being able to “relieve metallic and drug poisoning: for preventing and treating the poisoning of lead, arsenic, alcohol, and aconite.” Oriental Materia Medica simply states that phaseolus “removes all toxins.” A traditional prescription, Mahuang Lianqiao Chixiaodou Tang (Ma-huang, Forsythia, and Phaseolus Combination) uses one type of phaseolus (chixiaodou), along with ginger, jujube, licorice, morus bark, forsythia, and ma-haung to treat pruritis. It was recently shown to treat skin reactions to paint and other toxic and allergenic materials. Both types of phaseolus are characterized as having a sweet taste.
From Beijing Municipal Health Bureau:
Mung bean: Traditional medicine believes that mung bean, cold in property and sweet in flavor, is able to detoxify various toxins of metals and stones, white arsenics and vegetations, and able to speed up the metabolism of toxic substances inside the body. Therefore, people with regular exposure to lead, arsenics, cadmiums, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other toxic substances shall in their daily diet have more mung bean soup, mung bean porridge, mung bean sprouts, and so on.
From abz-nord.de:
Commonly used fat-reducing foods:
White gourd, date, water-caltrop, lotus roots, lotus seeds, oats, mung bean, water melon, cucumber, onion, turnip, hot pepper, old hen meat, mutton, spirit.Heat-stroke preventing:
Commonly used foods:
Mung bean, small red bean, small red bean soup, etc.
I need to make more Mung Bean Soup, don’t you think? 
One caution though. If you don’t like the texture of those sweet red beans that you find in a lot of Chinese deserts, you probably won’t like cooked mung beans, either.
