Thai soup blogging

I'm at Lance and Sheri's and I'm taking advantage of their well-appointed kitchen to try out a new recipe that could never have been assembled in the mere hour (and very few dirty dishes, with very little messy cleanup) that it took here. It's a thai tomato fish stew, but I have gone and changed the ingredients.

Here's my soup:

1/2 onion, chopped
1 tablespoon oil

Fry onion in oil in a BIG soup pot until tender. Add:

2 celery stalks, diced fine
2 leeks, chopped, whites and pales only

Enjoy rocking the heavy, beautifully sharp blade back and forth on the veggies. Maybe say, "How you like my Julia Child style, bitches?" in a high-pitched voice. Mix and cook down 2-3 minutes. Add:

3 red peppers, chopped (I didn't bother chopping fine)
1/2 tub sliced mushrooms
1 small head broccoli, chopped fine

Mix and cook. Realise you have:

1 eggplant, cut in big pieces that probably won't go in your mouth too easily until they cook down

That you really love in curries so throw it in. Cook until you realize that eggplant isn't getting any smaller, so you add:

1 big can diced tomatoes in juice

Realize it may not have been quite enough, but this is a stew and it's from Thailand, where there are how many tomatoes in the diet? Shrug and open:

2 cans of coconut milk, full-fat

Realize this stuff is serious. It is like icing in a can. It tastes like coconut icing in a can because you poke your finger around the lid and go all Gollum on the coconut saturated fat madness. Dump them into the soup pot. Realize the fatty sweet goodness isn't coming out of the can. Think briefly about forgetting the stew and eating the contents of the can whole. Feel like a glutton for thinking that. Take the spoon that has been stirring the soup and dig it into the coconut milk cans to get tomato bits on it so it won't taste good or be appetizing anymore. Realize the coconut milk isn't all coming out. Use the super-handy pot filler over Lance and Sheri's stove to try to rinse some of the coconut milk out of the can. Realize it is all fat and isn't going anywhere. Shrug and use your finger ostensibly to empty out the last remnants of sweet, beach-y coconut milk but really cram it in your mouth like there's no tomorrow.

Mix the soup.

Now, chop up:

1 1/2 pound boneless chicken, or white fish like perch or halibut, if you prefer.

Brown it on Lance and Sheri's grill in a little peanut oil. Hey, where did that peanut oil go? Oh, there's a grease drainer. How nice for the health nuts among us. The chicken will brown up nicely anyway. Reach for a spatula with a greasy, salmonella-laden hand to flip, stir and move the browned chicken to the soup pot. Squeeze in:

The juice of one lemon.

Add:

1 teaspoon Red Curry paste. Maybe a little bit more.
2 tablespoons fish sauce. Maybe a little bit more.

Wash the greasy, chickeny cutting board. Write in your blog as you contemplate the doneness of the soup and the tragedy of the lack of space in Lance and Sheri's fridge. Wish you had planned better, but realize that eggplant really needed to be used. Also those three red peppers. What is the deal with the failure rate on peppers? It's like they will go bad and soft if you look at them funny!

Think about chopping up:

a buttload of cilantro for garnish

And hope the soup comes out good.

Check on soup. Notice that it smells marvelous -- like the curries at Thai Hut. Think maybe your next dish will be a coconut milk based curry. Notice that those eggplants aren't getting any smaller, and if this thing turns out to be worthy of a second go, the eggplant will have to be sliced smaller.

Other possible variations include using the following veggies:

asparagus
kale
spinach
yellow peppers

But as it stands, it's pretty darn good. Maybe next time an extra can of coconut milk and a little stock or broth. But, in all, this was a fairly sucessful (and spicy) soup. Next time maybe I'll roast the eggplant ahead of time, too.