Tom Kha Gai soup

There is a wonderful restaurant at the corner of 60th and North Avenue here in Milwaukee. It is called Mekong Cafe. They serve Thai, Laos and Vietnamese food; the lunch buffet is reliably varied and delicious.

One of my favorite things to have there is Tom Kha Gai soup. I’ve searched for a recipe that comes close to the deliciousness that is that soup.

image of Tom Yum Gai by Lorenia via Flickr CC license

 

 

This recipe might just be even better than the Mekong version. It actually IS better because when I make it at home I don’t have to drive across town which saves me about stress and expense of about an hour in traffic.

Organic Ginger image by Artizone via Flickr CC license.

Image by Dubravko Soric via Flickr CC license

Image by Daniel R Blume via Flickr CC license

Image by Q family via Flickr CC license

THAI CHICKEN AND COCONUT SOUP (TOM KHA GAI)
makes four generous servings

1 stalk lemongrass (I haven’t been able to find this a my grocery store, so I leave this out.)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 medium onion, diced small
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tablespoon Thai red curry paste (This is the kind I use.)
6 quarter-inch wide slices fresh ginger (or grate an equivalent amount into the broth)
3 kaffir lime leaves (I used grated lime zest from one of the limes)
4 cups chicken stock (homemade is best, or use a box or bouillon)
1/2 pound (or up to a pound) boneless, skinless chicken thighs or breasts, sliced across the grain into 1/8-inch wide strips. You can also use tofu or shrimp.
2 cups shitake mushrooms, stemmed, caps quartered or 1 can 15 oz.straw mushrooms, drained.
1 14-ounce can coconut milk (Don’t use low-fat. Trust me. I tried it.)
Juice of one or two limes (about five tablespoons)
2 tablespoons nam pla (AKA fish sauce, also available in most groceries these days.)
3 green onions, trimmed and sliced into ¼ inch pieces
¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro

Trim lemongrass, cut into three pieces about four inches long. Whack the pieces with the flat side of your knife blade to crush slightly.

Heat oil in a saucepan over medium-high heat.

Saute onion and garlic for about two minutes.

Add lemongrass, curry paste, ginger discs, and lime leaf (or peel). Cook, stirring, for three minutes.

Add stock. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes.

Add coconut milk, chopped chicken and quartered mushroom caps (or drained canned straw mushrooms). Cook five minutes, or until chicken is just cooked through.

Add lime juice and nam pla. Taste for balance between nam pla and lime. If one flavor is dominating too much, add a little of the other.

Garnish with green onion and cilantro.

 

This is the story from the Unfussy Fare website where I found this delicious recipe. I’ll copy it here to save you from clicking through but I’ll also link it to the website for you, too.

This one goes out to everyone who ever brought food when the chips were down. I may have forgotten to write a note, given everything. I’m sure you were busy. It took forethought. You had to find that recipe, get groceries, and cook. Then you had to transport it all, which can be messy. You probably wondered if you’d ever get your Tupperware back. It was good of you.

Years ago, when my mother was dying, people brought food. There were casseroles and brownies, homegrown tomatoes and pots of soup. I was mystified. Did they really think we could eat, at a time like that? Well, yes. They knew we could. Everyone eventually does, inconceivable as it seems. I felt like a traitor, eating while my irrepressible mother was slipping away. But she would’ve rolled her eyes at that sentiment, and reminded me that life is hard enough without my efforts to make it harder.

Years later, my husband and I welcomed a son. Dinner came to our doorstep every night for weeks, courtesy of friends and neighbors. I wept with thankfulness. I wept a lot in those days, but that’s another story. I can still taste those meals, seasoned as they were with naked gratitude. I missed my Mom. I needed help. And help arrived, wrapped in foil and kindness.

Birth and death are demanding. They just swoop right and in and put their feet up, blithely flicking away the orderly unfolding of our days. We are tender and tired as we attend our loved ones at the beginning and the end. We sing and stroke. We wash and feed. The clock ceases to provide useful information. These are the rhythms of lives, not days. In the midst of these marathons of nurture, gifts of food stand in simple relief. Meals arrive like little missives from the world where the clock still applies, like souvenirs of simpler times. It’s hard to remember simpler times when you’re in the thick of life’s seismic upheavals. Food gives strength, and comfort.

A family friend dropped this soup by for me and my stepfather when my mom was sick. We were dazed by the unfolding loss. My memories of that time are foggy, but I recall thinking this soup was the most delicious thing I ever tasted. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to even notice a bowl of soup just then, never mind enjoy it. But I savored every bite. It served to remind me that a world outside of sorrow still existed. Life would be there, with all its flavors and delights, when the time came to gather up the fragments of my broken heart and look forward again.

To this day, the complicated interplay of flavors in Tom Kha Gai puts me in mind of nurture, solace, and motherhood. When I know someone with a new baby, or an illness, or a death in the family, this is the dish I most often bring. I pass it on with thanks, for all the grace and sustenance.

I get a lot of requests for this recipe, which is the true measure of any dish’s popularity, if you ask me. This soup somehow manages to be feisty and harmonious at the same time. It’s interesting enough to impress foodie types, but simple and comforting enough to appeal to less adventurous eaters. (You might need to explain to the aforementioned “less adventurous eaters” that the big stalks of lemongrass and discs of ginger floating around in the soup aren’t meant to be eaten. They’re just adding flavor.) Sometimes I throw in cooked basmati rice at the end. That may be some kind of Thai-food no-no, but I find chicken and rice a soothing combination.

Recipe Review: Carbonara

image by jlaceda via Flickr CC IMG_1300 carbonara

This Rachael Ray recipe for basic Carbonara is quick and easy.

I’ve made just a couple of tweaks, but it is still pretty much her original recipe (which you can see HERE.)

• About 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/3 pound pancetta or bacon, small dice
• 5 to 6 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1/2 cup dry white wine (could use stock if you don’t have wine handy)
• 3 large egg yolks, separated.  Get rid of the egg whites in another recipe — you don’t need them for this.
• Salt and pepper
• 1 pound pasta such as linguine, spaghetti or egg tagliatelle.  I like the wider pasta for this recipe.
• Grated Pecorino Romano and/or Parmigiano-Reggiano
• 1/2 cup flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped

PREPARATION

Bring a large pot of salted water to boil for pasta.

Heat olive oil, 3 turns of the pan, in a large, deep skillet over medium heat. Add pancetta or bacon, brown 3-4 minutes, then add garlic and some black pepper, and stir 2 minutes more. Add wine and reduce heat to low. Whisk up egg yolks and season with salt and pepper.

Add pasta to salted boiling water and cook to al dente.

Add 1 full cup of starchy cooking water to egg yolks in a slow stream to temper them. Reserve an extra half-cup starchy water in case the pasta gets too tight when you toss it.  Drain pasta and add to pancetta and garlic, remove from heat and toss with egg yolks and handfuls of grated cheeses, parsley, adjust salt and pepper to taste.

That’s it.  If you are the kind of person who always has bacon and parsley on hand, you could make this and be eating it in less than 1/2 hour.

Review:

Be careful when browning the bacon or pancetta.  It can easily burn since you are frying such small pieces.  Likewise, watch the garlic carefully when you add it.  With the already hot bacon grease, the garlic needs much less time than usual to get overly browned.

I didn’t read the recipe carefully enough at first and nearly whisked up the egg whites, too.  That would not work out very well, so don’t do that!  Also, DO take out the pasta water and keep out at least as much as she recommends.  Mine got pretty thick so I added a splash of milk, which may or may not be the Italian way.  I have no idea. It worked in a pinch. Have everything ready for the end — the cheese and the parsley.  It comes together in a flash.  Also — DO use the fresh flat-leave parsley if you can.  It really adds a nice fresh flavor.

Follow the steps for tempering the egg yolks carefully.  You don’t want the eggs to cook too soon.  They melt into the sauce and thicken it with the cheese.

The down side of this recipe is all the grease.  You don’t drain the bacon grease and that PLUS the olive oil adds up to quite a bit.

I suppose you could experiment with draining most of the bacon grease (maybe leave 1 T or so) and then add more water or cheese or something at the end.

I think a little lemon flavor and maybe some green onions would be nice in this.

It might also benefit from a dash of crushed red pepper flakes.

I might try some more variations in the future.  I will let you know when I do!

Overall:

FOUR out of FIVE FORKS!

Really quick and easy, but a little overboard on the oil/grease in my opinion.

Even my very picky nearly 16-year-old daughter ate it (after picking around all the “green stuff”).

Enjoy!  And, as always, please let me know if you try this recipe, how it turns out for you, and how you like it!

image via Flickr CC by cookbookman17; Fresh Parsley —
A bunch of fresh hand picked parsley. This parsley is bursting with flavor and ready for use.

Good and Cheap

image by Owen Jones, via Flickr CC license

I am always on the search for inexpensive, healthy meals that also taste really good and don’t take forever to make (or have a hundred ingredients).

I read this article by NPR entitled “Cheap Eats:  Cookbook shows how to eat well on a Food Stamp Budget.”

The best part is that you can get this great cookbook with a lot of great “cheap eats” for FREE here.

“It really bothered me,” Cheap Eats cookbook author Leanne Brown says. “The 47 million people on food stamps — and that’s a big chunk of the population — don’t have the same choices everyone else does.”

Brown guessed that she could help people in SNAP, the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, find ways to cook filling, nourishing and flavorful meals. So she set out to write a cookbook full of recipes anyone could make on a budget of just $4 a day.

The result is Good and Cheap, which is free online and has been downloaded over 200,000 times since she posted it on her website in early June. A July Kickstarter campaign also helped Brown raise $145,000 to print copies for people without computer access.

 

The recipes in Good and Cheap are organized into several categories:  Breakfast, Soup, Salad, Snacks and Small Bites, Handheld, Dinner, Big Batches, Staples, Drinks, Desserts, Sauces and Flavor and several generally informative sections about shopping and planning are included as well.

In looking through the recipes, I found several that I plan to try. They look simple to prepare, flavorful and as advertised — good and cheap! The photography is excellent, too!  Nearly all the recipes have beautiful, full-color photographs to help you see what your finished product will (hopefully) look like.

I hope you’ll check out this great little cookbook. Please let me know if you do, what you make and how you like it. Thanks!

 

Cilantro Lime Chicken with Corn and Black Beans

Cilantro Lime Chicken with Corn and Black Beans photo by TTQ creative commons 4.0

Cilantro Lime Chicken w/ Corn and Black Beans

Ingredients:

olive oil

1 1/2 pounds chicken thighs or any boneless, skinless chicken pieces

salt and pepper to taste

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp. Arizona Dreaming (from Penzey’s)

2 minced garlic cloves

1 small onion, diced (can use red if you have it)

1 (16 oz) bag frozen corn

Juice from 2 limes

1 can black beans, drained and rinsed

1/2 bunch fresh cilantro, chopped

Heat the olive oil in a good skillet.  Chop the chicken into bite sized chunks.  Add to the hot pan, season it with salt and pepper but don’t go crazy at this point.  Brown the chicken til nearly done.  Meanwhile you have chopped the onion and garlic (or opened the jar of chopped garlic you have in your fridge).  Throw the onion and garlic in the pan. Add the cumin and Arizona Dremaing now.  Smells good!  As the onion softens, throw the bag of corn in the microwave to steam (that is the kind I buy).  Or you can just zap it halfway and let it finish cooking in the skillet.  Open your can of beans, drain and rinse.  Add that to the skillet as well.  Chop the cilantro and juice the limes.  Throw those items in at the very end.

I chose to use this chicken mixture to fill corn tortillas which I warmed with a little olive oil in a skillet til they were hot, pliable and just beginning to brown.  I added sour cream and some sliced jalapenos from a jar.

This was a great tasting, healthy, quick to fix meal!

FIVE FORKS!

You could also serve the chicken/corn/bean mixture with tortilla chips and other toppings such as guacamole, salsa, and cheese.  I don’t think it needed any of that, though.

Arizona Dreaming contains ancho chili pepper, black pepper, onion, garlic, paprika, spices, cumin, citric acid, Mexican oregano, cilantro, lemon peel, chipotle pepper, red pepper, jalapeño, cocoa, natural smoke flavoring.

Recipe inspired by:  Over the Big Moon, SixSistersStuff.com; then also further revised and re-adapted by The Tromp Queen! (me).

 

One pound of hamburger: What’s for dinner?

Recently I was at a loss for ideas of what to cook for dinner one evening.

I decided to use my Facebook status to ask friends for ideas.

This is what I said:
Let’s play “What’s for dinner at the Hasker Haus?”
A pound of hamburger and a fairly well stocked pantry and fridge. Ideas? Go!!

I got lots of good ideas, so I decided to turn the list of replies into this post.

Sunchild57 Photography via Flickr CC

My “usual suspects” for a pound of hamburger would be tacos, spaghetti and meat sauce, spaghetti and meatballs, chili, or chili spaghetti (aka Cincinnati Chili).  I requested that my friends not suggest any of those “usual” ideas.

From Lynette:   brown the hamburger – boil and mash 3-4 med to large potatoes – put hamburger in bottom of casserole dish, place 1 can of vegetable beef soup over the hamburger – then place mashed potatoes over that to top off the casserole – then garnish with shredded cheddar cheese – bake at 350 for 30 minutes – yummy

From Lynn:  Hamburger stroganoff. Flour, garlic salt, pepper, cream mushroom, sour cream. Over noodles.

From Jeff: Hamburger helper!!

From Pat:  Goulash the easy way. Med onion diced, a can of Kidney beans, Macaroni, hamburger, dice or whole canned tomatoes, salt, pepper and basil.

From Karen: Order Dominoes!

From Sara:  Sour cream noodle bake from Pioneer Woman. Or ummmm, hamburgers?

Sour Cream Noodle Bank: Pioneer Woman recipe

From Rachel:  My go-to hamburger easy recipes are pretty basic, but when I don’t feel like doing much they’re perfect. We do hamburger, peas and rice with soy sauce. It’s yummy. Steam the rice, Brown the hamburger, add rice to the drained meat, add in soy sauce, throw in a bag if frozen peas. Easy. Or I do hamburger ramen noodle casserole, a big favorite. Brown hamburger, drain. Add in jar of spaghetti sauce and halve up 4 ramen noodle packs, cover the noodles with the sauce. Use two seasoning packs, add a little less than a cup of water and whatever bag of frozen veggies you have. Corn, peas, mixed veggies, whatever. Simmer for about ten minutes. Add shredded cheese to top and cover so cheese melts. The kids LOVE this one. Or I do hamburger soup – whatever stock or broth I have, browned meat, carrots, potatoes diced, celery, onion, corn, garlic. Season with salt and pepper, soy sauce, basil, a bit of cumin, paprika.

Sara again:  Maid-Rite style burgers.

image by Jacob A Walker via Flickr CC. Maid-rite loose meat sandwich.

From Marianne and Stacy:   This is the recipe I wanted when I started all of this! 1# gr. beef, 1 egg, 3/4t salt, pepper to taste, 1/2c milk, 1c crushed cornflakes, 2T minced onion, 1T Worcestershire, 1-2 cloves garlic. Form into 4 patties, 1″thick. Broil 3-5″ from heat 10-12m, turning halfway through.  Addendum from Laura H:  To me it has to have cornflakes or it won’t taste like Mom’s… Knowing you like info, I add this. Mom got this from a magazine in the 50’s. It was called Budget Porterhouse Steak . When I wrote out the recipe for the kids, I called it Good Broiled Hamburger.

From Laura K:  Turkish Kebob?   Me:  Köfte!
Recipes for this dish: Turkish Meatballs from food.com; Turkish Köfte Recipe from chow.com; Köfte Kabobs from All Recipes.com; How to make the perfect lamb kofte; Lamb Kofte with Yogurt Sauce form Epicurious; Kofta Kabobs with Tzatziki from Food network.

From Bert:   I do a potato bake – brown the burger with a diced onion, add a can of tomato soup, add a lot of raw sliced potatoes. Stir together and bake 375′ for an hour or so…

I really appreciate all the choices and recommendations.  Now I have many new ideas for the next few weeks of family dinners, and you do, too!

Something New: Recipe Reviews!

I love to try new recipes.  I find them in many places:  online, on TV, in cookbooks, in magazines, from friends, etc.  I make new recipes sometimes several times a week so I thought a new feature for this blog could be for me to report how the recipes turn out for me.

I haven’t thought about a rating system, but I will give that some thought.   Spoons or forks up instead of thumbs up?  Coffee cups instead of stars?  I’m open to suggestions here!

Sometimes I turn on the TV when I am folding clothes or when I am eating lunch.  One day, I discovered a cooking show on the Food Network called “10 Dollar Dinners.”  I watched enough to know I wanted to make all the recipes featured on the show that day.  I set the DVR to record it, and then looked up the recipes online.

Get ready for some Moroccan flavors!

It took me a few days to gather all the ingredients, because one was something I had never heard of before.:  lemon confit.  Basically lemons are preserved in salt with a few spices and left to sit for about 30 days.  The lemons get very soft and salty (of course).  I didn’t want to wait 30 days to make this recipe so I searched for a quicker solution.  I found a method and improvised a bit to make it fit my needs.  I think it worked, but since I don’t know what lemon confit is supposed to taste like I guess I’m not totally sure.  The meal was delicious, at any rate.

I found various recipes for making lemon confit:

Here is one that takes 48 hours.  

This one is very thorough but it takes 2 weeks.  (I learned that preserved lemons are the same things as lemon confit).

This one takes a month.

This one bakes in an oven for 3 hours.

The three-hour recipe was getting close, but I only had about 2 hours.  So this is what I did:  I cut 2 organic lemons into fourths and put them in a small saucepan with 3 T. of kosher salt.  I added just enough water to cover the lemons.  I boiled it and then simmered it until I needed it.  I did let them cool a bit before I chopped 4 of the quarters up for my chicken tangine.

Here is the link for the whole dinner menu:
Melissa’s Ten Dollar Moroccan Chicken Dinner.

First I started on the Carrot and Cauliflower Soup.  Since it is January in Wisconsin, I decided to serve it warm not chilled.

Here is the recipe for the soup.  Please follow the link to read the whole thing. To whet your appetite though, the ingredients needed for the soup are:  olive oil, onion, carrots, cauliflower, red pepper flakes, cumin, lemon zest, chicken or vegetable stock, salt and pepper, and plain yogurt, and a green onion for garnish if you wish.

This is what mine looked like:

Carrot and Cauliflower Soup made by The Tromp Queen following Melissa D’Arabian’s recipe

Mine is little chunky because my pan was too big and when I tried to use my wonderful Cuisinart immersion blender in the pan, the soup was splurting about quite a bit.  Also I wasn’t careful after I added the yogurt and it got a bit curdled.  (This bowl was reheated for my lunch today, so it is a little more curdlier, too!).

I started on the chicken after I got the vegetables going and simmering.  The recipe for Chicken Tangine, the main dish, is here.

The ingredients are: chicken thighs and drumsticks, salt and pepper, butter and olive oil, ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, garlic, wine, chicken broth, lemon confit, olives (I used both kalamata and green), cilantro, and parsley.  I only used drumsticks because they were on sale this week.  I think you could leave out the parsley, frankly.  I don’t think you really have to use the wine, either, though I happened to have some so I did.  The lemon confit does add a distinct flavor but it you have to substitute I would add lemon juice and lemon zest and a bit of extra salt.  It won’t be the same, but it would help in the right direction.

Here is what mine looked like (leftovers for lunch today!):

Chicken Tangine made by The Tromp Queen following Melissa D’Arabian’s recipe from Food Network

The final component to the menu is the couscous you see served under the chicken in the photo above.  The recipe is here.  The ingredients needed for Melissa’s Couscous with Peas and Mint are:  frozen peas, couscous (I used whole wheat), butter, mint, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

I used Trader Joe’s whole wheat couscous in a box.  I only used 1.5 cups, but you could probably use less.  We had way TOO much couscous even with cutting the recipe down.  You decide what is best for your folks, but 2.5 cups of couscous that the recipe calls for could feed a neighborhood pot luck.  I followed the direction on the box of couscous to scale down the amount.  If I remember correctly the amount of couscous is equal to the amount of water, so it is pretty easy to scale up or down.  I kept the other ingredients about the same.

The Review:

Overall:  I thought the meal was delicious.  I would not describe doing all three at the same time EASY, though.  Maybe do just the chicken and the couscous one time, and do the soup another time til you get the hang of what needs to be done.  The colors and aromas of the meal are beautiful and incredibly appetizing.

Soup:  I think it had very good flavor.  I used about 1/2 the amount of red pepper flakes and it was still noticeably spicy.  I like it, but both my other family members thought it was still too much spice.  My husband did not like the texture of the creamy soup and wondered if I could leave more vegetable chunks the next time I make it.  I liked the texture of the creamy soup, so I will have to mull that idea over a bit.  I am also curious what it would taste like cold as the recipe calls for.  It was very good warm (hot, really).  I didn’t figure out the calorie count, but from years of Weight Watcher experience I think this would be a very low point soup.

Chicken:  The main dish has interesting, complex flavors.  My only experience with Moroccan food is from Epcot in Disney World, so I don’t have much real world experience to compare to.  I thought it was delicious.  I love olives, lemon and cilantro.  The spices used were not overpowering at all.  I might make it next time using just lemon zest and juice to see if the trouble of making the lemon confit is worth it.  I will definitely make this dish again.  I might consider using chicken off the bone next time to make eating it easier.  You could easily use boneless, skinless thighs cut into bite sized chunks and get nearly the same effect.  The bones add flavor, granted, but it was a little messy to eat.

Couscous:  Given the fact that the chicken dish is so complex and flavorful, I’m not sure the couscous needs quite so much going on.  I would use fewer peas next time and not use fresh squeezed lemon juice. I forgot to add the mint!  I didn’t have any fresh and would have used dried.  Again, I’m not sure it needs anything extra, though.  The couscous is really there to soak up all the delicious liquid from the Chicken Tangine.

Overall:  I would make this meal again. 4.5 out of 5 forks!