Tom Yum Yum Soup
I am once again able to breathe through my nose, most of the time. But sadly, I have given Chris my cold. His version turned into an instant sore throat, so yesterday I did some brainstorming for a soup for him that would be able to supply me with some serious spiciness. The solution: tom yum!
I used this recipe as my jumping-off point: http://thaifood.about.com/od/thairecipes/r/tomyumkung.htm
As usual, I dumped ingredients into a pot without measuring. First I heated some chicken stock and added spoonfuls of jarred lemongrass and chopped kaffir lime leaves. These two ingredients are new to me, and I got the impression that no amount of cooking would make the lime leaves edible. I also added fish sauce to this - again, an ingredient I have never used before, made from sardines and salt. There was supposed to be garlic added here too but I forgot it. I also added a couple of spoons full of Chinese death sauce. I don’t know what the actual name of the stuff it, but I think it is a standard Chinese table condiment, made from chilies, salt, vinegar, and sesame seed oil. After a few minutes of boiling, I ran the whole mess through a strainer to remove the lumpy bits.
As a side effect of being stuffy, spicy foods have taken on a whole new dimension of flavor for me. As in they actually have flavor. When I first realized that I could make my nose-clog loosen up with spicy food, a coworker kindly provided me with some American death-in-a-bottle that I found to be deliciously sweet. I doused a slice of crappy pizza with the stuff, and could easily have used a quarter-cup more. It would have made cardboard taste good.
In this case, the Chinese death sauce was what I used as a substitute for fresh or dried chili peppers. In the past I’ve used this stuff in tiny quantities at arm’s length. This time I held back in order to spare Chris, but some tiny tastes verified that, yes, there is flavor under what I had previously only been able to experience as head-exploding pain.
Anyway, so once I had this mostly-bland broth assembled, I added about a pound of shrimp, and shitake mushrooms. After those were cooked, I added coconut milk, red pepper, and cherry tomatoes; and this was served with chopped fresh cilantro. To my own serving I added a lot more of the death sauce, plus a lot of lime juice and extra cilantro.
Chris got a little lime juice and only a little cilantro, because I wasn’t sure how he would react to either. I was worried that he would hate the soup or that it would irritate his throat instead of helping - but nope! To the contrary, he declared it my best soup yet! In its “bland” state it was just spicy enough that the burning of his mouth distracted him from the rawness of his throat.
I’ll have to find whole chilies the next time around, because I didn’t care for the vinegar/sesame oil flavor that the extra Chinese death-sauce added to my bowl. However, being able to amp up my own serving without killing Chris was a bonus. Also, this recipe would be better off starting with a very low-salt chicken base, because the fish sauce adds great flavor but brings a lot of salt to the party with it.
I only eat shrimp on rare occasions because I don’t care to support the shrimping industry. According to a National Geographic article from a few years back, typical shrimp boats scoop up ten pounds of bycatch for each pound of shrimp, and that bycatch gets dumped dead back into the sea, because shrimp boats are rigged to carry shrimp, not assorted other stuff plus shrimp. And shrimp farms are great, except that they have to be built where perfectly good wetlands currently sit. But oh my goodness, do I love shrimp. I figure if I buy them from Whole Foods, the extra cost may be supporting shrimpers who use less destructive practices.
Anyway, the soup was delicious, and easy to make. I’ll definitely be making it again, and not just because I have jars of exotic ingredients to use up.