Tom Yum-my!

As I mentioned in earlier posts, Thai is one of my favorite cuisines and I really enjoy the balanced and complex fresh flavors you get. Perhaps, my all time favorite broth/soup is Tom Yum. Tom yum is a spicy broth with some citrus backnotes and a nice depth of flavor.

It’s usually served with mushrooms, coriander and sometimes prawns. Since I wanted to have this as a meal I turned it to something that resembles ramen, so I served it with noodles, oyster mushrooms, coriander, chicken and carrot. It’s a bit unusual, but it’s ridiculously tasty!!!! The soup is actually good for you and ideal for weight loss. The chili speeds up your metabolism, the ginger has antioxidants, there’s no added fat and it doesn’t taste like “diet food”.  I’m not going to any more detail about the nutrition bits of this recipe.

I really don’t want to drag this anymore… recipe time! (makes 2-3 bowls)

Tom Yum “Ramen” with Chicken

Ingredients:

For the soup:

• 3 cups of chicken stock
• 1 1 inch piece of ginger (thinly sliced)
• 3 chili (roughly chopped – I used birds eye)
• 2 tsp tamarind paste
• zest of 1 lemon (use a vegetable peeler 😉 )
• 1 lemongrass stalk (bruised and roughly chopped)
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• 3 chicken legs
• 2 tbsp light soy sauce
• 2 tbsp fish sauce

To serve:

• 1 small bunch of fresh coriander leaves
• 1 handful of oyster mushrooms
• a few handfuls of cooked noodles
• 1 carrot cut julienne

Execution:

1. To prepare the soup just put all the soup ingredients (apart from the lemon juice) in a pot and bring to a boil and then simmer for 30 mins. Finish with the lemon juice.
2. Sieve the soup. Keep the chicken legs.
3. Let the chicken cool enough to handle and shred.
4. To serve, put the noodles, (roughly tear) mushrooms, chicken, coriander leaves and carrots in a bowl. Ladle in the (HOT) broth until everything becomes just submerged.
5. Indulge!

Tips:

• You can replace the tamarind paste with palm sugar, brown sugar, or even honey. I like tamarind here because it gives a nice tangy flavor.
• To make it slightly more traditional skip the noodles and carrots. Serve it with prawns instead of chicken.
• To turn this to tom Khaa just add a splash of coconut milk. This variant is more luxurious.
• If you choose to use button mushrooms make sure to finely chop them so they cook as soon as you pour the broth over them. I really like oyster mushrooms though because they are quite delicate.
• If you’ve got leftover liquid you can use it the next day as a stir fry sauce. Just add about a tablespoon of cornflour to help it thicken a bit before adding it to the pan (or wok).

My thai green curry paste

Thai is probably one of my all time favorite cuisines that I simply can’t get enough of. Probably the most iconic thai dish is their green curry. This dish is packed with bright flavors, unlike the more common indian-style one, which is really tasty but more earthy and heavy due to the extensive use of spices. Fun fact: unlike common belief, curry in India is not the curry that is believed to be in western countries. Curry just means to cook meat or vegetables in spices.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a rant, so here’s another one! Have you ever googled for Thai green curry recipes? Most of the results come up with recipes using store bought green curry pastes. Surely, I can see why people would want to buy a ready made paste for convenience, but you can’t copy the instructions from the back of a jar, call it a recipe and get a gazillion positive reviews! Not only that, but the jarred curry paste is nothing but green! It’s got a weird grey tinge to it, because it’s been sitting on a supermarket shelf since forever. Making your own curry paste takes 5 minutes tops, it is 100 times tastier than the jarred stuff and you know what’s in it – no need to be a Chemistry professor to understand the ingredients.  The only downside of making your own paste is that it needs a blender or food processor… I don’t think you can get away with really fine chopping. My knife skills aren’t that good, so I don’t know.

Anyway, here’s my recipe for a Thai green curry paste, that I guarantee will knock the socks off any store bought equivalent.  It should be enough for three good portions

Thai Green Curry Paste

Ingredients

• 60g coriander (FRESH)
• 1 white onion
• 3 cloves garlic
• 3 green birds eye chili
• 3/4 tsp cumin
• 1 1/2 tsp coriander powder
• 2 tbsp oyster sauce
• 15cm lemongrass stalk (or about 1 tbsp of the already puree’d stuff)
• 1 tbsp vegetable oil
• 2 tbsp water

Execution

1. Put everything in a food processor or blender and turn into a paste. That’s all. Just bare in mind you may want to add the chillies one by one and taste. You want the paste to be slightly too spicy as the heat will settle down a bit after cooking and adding the coconut milk. I personally added 1 whole chilli and 2 with the seeds removed.

Tips

• To make a dish out of it, just put the paste into a dry frying pan (2-3 heaped tbsps per portion) and cook on a medium-high heat. That’s always the start. If you want a chicken curry you add the chicken after cooking the paste, stir it around for 2-3 minutes, add some coconut milk and let it simmer for 25 mins stirring occasionally (or until the chicken is cooked through). If you’re making prawns or fish, you first add the coconut milk (about 100-150ml per portion), cook it for 10 mins, add the prawns and let it cook for another 2-3 minutes.
• You can keep this in the fridge for about a week. Just bare in mind it is fresh, so the longer you keep it the more it becomes like one of the store bought ones.
• You can make a big batch and freeze it into ice cubes! Whenever you want to make a green curry you just pop 2-3 ice cubes per portion straight into a pan and cook as normal (of course you may need to cook the paste off for an extra minute or two)
• You can also use this as a marinade!
• You can blend it with some fish, mold into patties and make the best fish cakes you’ve ever had!
• Blend it with chicken and call it meatballs!

This list is getting too big. You get the picture… you can just about do anything with it! I highly recommend you try this one. You won’t regret it. 🙂

Thai inspired basil and chili prawns

Thai cuisine is probably one of my all time favorites. It’s all about balancing sweet and salty, while at the same time showcasing the quality of the ingredients. Not only does the flavor hit the spot, but typically the dishes are quite healthy.

Enough mumbling about food. The story behind the next recipe is rather crap. Specifically, I had some basil in the fridge from my pesto recipe, so the first thing that came to mind is making a Thai influenced dish with it. The other reason for cooking this dish is to test my new camera on something really colourful! 😀

Basil and chili prawns

Ingredients

• 200g king prawns (raw, peeled and de-veined)
• 1 finely chopped clove garlic
• 1 chili
• 10 basil leafs
• 2 tsp vegetable oil
• 2 tsp oyster sauce
• 1 tbsp sliced almonds
• juice of 1/2 a lemon
• 1 tsp brown soft sugar
• salt, pepper

Execution

1. Cut the chili in half, remove the seeds and slice to 2mm thick.
2. Slice the basil leaves about 1cm.
3. In a bowl mix the prawns with the oil, oyster sauce, chili, sugar and half the basil, salt and pepper.
4. Stir-fry the prawns in a hot pan over medium-high heat for about a minute, or until the prawns turn pink. They’re not cooked yet… keep then in the pan.
5. Add to the pan 3-4 tbsp of water and cook for another minute and add the almonds.
6. When the water almost evaporates completely and it becomes thick enough to start coating the prawns add the lemon juice and the remaining basil.
7. Keep stir frying for another 10-20s and serve with some rice; I used a wild rice and basmati variety.
8. The whole cooking process of the prawns shouldn’t take more than 3-4 minutes.

Tips

• You can replace the soft brown sugar with just white sugar, or even honey.
• You can add some cooked noodles in the pan in the last minute of cooking to transform this to a noodle dish.
• For this dish I used a birds eye chili, which is quite hot. As a rule of thumb, smaller chili varieties are hotter than bigger ones. The wrinkly and odd shaped ones (eg. habanero, scotch bonnet) are the most spicy ones.
• Cashew nuts or penuts also work for this dish. I used almonds because that’s what I had lying around in my kitchen.
• Prawns usually come with their intestine track (vein) still in them. Unless you enjoy eating prawn poop I’d recommend you get rid of that. The following video shows how to prepare prawns: