Great Winter Recipe – Thai Spicy Coconut Soup

My guy loves Thai food.  Loves.  To be honest, I don’t actually think I ever had Thai food until we started dating… and now I’m a big fan too!  However, eating out every time one of us wants Thai food can get very expensive, so I figured I better learn a few recipes I could make at home.  Enter Pinterest…

I’ve already tried a Tom Kha soup recipe, and it was good, but one can never have too many variations to try until they find the one their family loves.  So when we were iced in a few weeks ago, I tried a new one—Thai Spicy Coconut Soup.

The ingredients were almost exactly like the Tom Kha recipe we’ve tried before, with the exception of a few things that we will add next time around.  But I’ll get to that more in a bit.

First, what’s needed:

2 tablespoons of olive oil
1 ½ cups of mushrooms (we like to use straw mushrooms)
Diced red bell pepper (we used green because the store didn’t have red)
1 inch peeled and minced ginger
4 cloves of minced garlic
Half a stalk of lemongrass (we like to use the Gourmet Garden lemongrass paste)
2 teaspoons of red curry paste
3 cups of chicken broth
1 can of coconut milk
1 tablespoon of sugar
3 tablespoons of soy sauce
1 – 1 ½ cups of cooked chicken, cubed or shredded
Sliced green onion (we like a lot…)
A handful of cherry tomatoes
Cilantro
Rice or Ramen noodles

Now let’s cook:

Heat the oil in a pan over medium heat.

Add the garlic, ginger, lemongrass, mushrooms, and bell pepper.  Cook for 3 minutes.

Add the curry and cook another minute.

Transfer to a stock pot and add the coconut milk, chicken broth, sugar, and soy sauce.  Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, boil the chicken in a separate pot and add once the base is ready.

Finally, add the green onion and tomatoes.  Heat through and serve.

Best served with rice or noodles (we like to use Ramen noodles) and fresh cilantro…

Now, as with any dish you prepare, it is important to taste test before serving.  Especially with Thai soup.  The end product may not be spicy enough, not salty enough, not sweet enough, or the other ends of these spectrums.

For us, this soup base was not any of the above.  So we added another can of coconut milk, chopped dried chili pepper, more sugar, and more soy.  Even then, we decided the soy just wasn’t right and next time we’d try with fish sauce.

And basil.  For whatever reason, the recipe did not call for basil and we both agreed basil would add a ton of necessary flavor to this dish.

But don’t get me wrong, this soup was yummy.  We enjoyed it for three nights until it was all gone.  The dish proved perfect for a cold winter night.

And the Thai food lover approved.

Are you a Thai soup fan?  Have any Thai recipes to share?  I’d love to hear from you!

Original Pinterest recipe found on this site:

http://joansfoodwanderings.blogspot.com/2013/10/spicy-thai-coconut-soup.html

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Tiffany A. White is the author of the YA mystery Football Sweetheart series available on Kindle and Nook.  She is available for contact via Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or via email at tiffany {at} tiffanyawhite {dot} com.