Category Archives: All Recipes

  • Tom Yum Goong: Thai Hot And Sour Shrimp Soup

    October 12, 2012

    27 Comments

    Tom Yum Goong: Thai Hot and Sour Shrimp Soup

    Sometimes cooking with the season or from the garden takes you to surprising places. California isn’t Thailand, but we do have a Kaffir lime tree and it was time to use those tasty leaves. Kaffir lime leaves are a key ingredient in southeast Asian cooking and no dish shows off their bright citrus flavor like Tom Yum Goong, Thai hot and sour soup with sweet shrimp. This dish packs a ton of flavor and takes just a few minutes to make (pretty healthy, too). The only real challenge is in the shopping, rather than the cooking.

    Kaffir lime leaf.

    The problem is that Kaffir lime leaves are not an easy ingredient to find, and neither is lemongrass, another key ingredient. We are lucky enough to have a Kaffir lime tree (it gets too cold here for other limes), but otherwise you will need to order the leaves or find them fresh or frozen in specialty markets (BTW- the Kaffir lime fruit is generally considered too bitter and acidic for culinary uses). The same goes for lemongrass, although that may be a bit more readily available. If you must substitute, lime zest and lemon zest are your best options. But Kaffir lime leaves and lemongrass really are worth looking for, their bright citrus notes are a key to many popular southeast Asian dishes, and their flavors just pop. If you want “restaurant-quality” flavor in your cooking, these are the kind of ingredients you need.

    And as we noted, once you have the ingredients for Tom Yum Goong, you are well on your way to making an easy, tasty dish. The basics are simple; heat some chicken stock, simmer some crushed lemongrass and Kaffir lime leaves in the broth for 5-6 minutes and them remove then from the broth, as they are inedible. Then add some mushrooms and chili paste to the broth and simmer for a minute before adding some shrimp and fish sauce and cooking another minute or so. Take the pot of the heat and let the shrimp finish cooking in the hot soup. Taste and adjust seasoning, add some lime juice, chilies and cilantro. Serve.

    We do tweak the traditional recipe somewhat. Some versions of the recipe call for fresh or canned straw mushrooms. While the recipe will taste fine with the straw mushrooms, we prefer to use sliced fresh shiitake mushrooms for a meatier flavor and texture. We brown them lightly before adding them to the soup. It adds a few minutes of work, but since this dish takes less than twenty minutes, we think it is time well spent. Our final adjustment to the recipe is the level of spice, we start with just a few tablespoons of chili paste and add more to taste. You can use more chili paste than you might think, but it is easier to add than subtract. This soup has so many good flavors you don’t want to drown them out with too much heat. We serve this dish with coconut rice and the sweet rice matched with the hot and sour soup make for a lovely meal.

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  • Weekly Cocktail #32: The Bullseye

    October 11, 2012

    34 Comments

    The Bullseye Cocktail.

    If you detect a trend in our weekly cocktails toward citrus and spice combinations, you win a gold star. 😉 To our tastes, few flavor combinations work better for the holiday season. And one of our favorite flavor combos is ginger and orange. Many holiday orange/spice recipes go heavy on the allspice and cloves, and that is great (particularly in Tiki drinks, which work for any season), but ginger is a brighter, lighter spice that works well in cocktails and doesn’t hit you over the head. And the Bullseye is a very tasty example of a ginger/citrus cocktail. .

    The Bullseye combines dry gin, ginger liqueur, orange juice and lemon juice. You get a light, bright and spicy sip that is very refreshing but still tastes like a cocktail for the fall or winter. You can also serve this drink as a cocktail or a “long” drink on the rocks, it works either way. The orange and lemon juice balance the sweet and sour, the gin adds herbal notes and the ginger adds a touch of zing, but also cleans the palate. A true “cocktail” in the sense that it tastes better than the sum of its parts.

    But, to be fair, there is very little wrong with the “parts”. There is never anything “wrong” with fresh orange or lemon juice (other than not having enough). And any good juniper-forward gin will work well here, as the juniper plays very well with the ginger. As for the ginger liqueur, the best choice these days is Domaine de Canton. Domaine de Canton combines ginger and other spices with quality brandy and a touch of vanilla and honey. It is sweet and spicy with well-integrated ginger flavor. You can substitute Domaine de Canton for part or all of the Curaçao or sugars in many traditional cocktails for added spice and a change of pace. Domaine de Canton isn’t cheap, about $35 dollars a bottle, but a little goes a long, long way. And if you want to try more “modern” riffs on traditional cocktails Domaine de Canton, along with St. Germain, gives you all sorts of room to play around.

    The Bullseye also works as a long drink.

    So where did we find the Bullseye? It comes from the Cafe Royal Cocktail Book, a British cocktail book from the 1930’s.  We were working on a guest cocktail post for Claire at Promenade Plantings and found this recipe. The Bullseye did not make it into that post (you will see what did next week), but we tried it and then kept “trying” it until we decided to make the Bullseye a weekly cocktail. We immediately took to the citrus and ginger spice and thought the Bullseye would be a delicious holiday cocktail. We expect to serve this one a lot over the next few months.

    The Bullseye Cocktail:

    Ingredients:

    • 1 oz. dry gin
    • 1 oz. ginger liqueur (Domaine de Canton)
    • 1/2 oz. fresh orange juice
    • 1/2 oz. fresh lemon juice

    Assemble:

    1. Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake thoroughly and pour into a chilled cocktail glass, coupé or flute. Or pour into a highball glass with a few ice cubes. Serve.
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