Thai Noodle Soup With Fishballs

I haven't made any of the huge range of Thai soups since I almost killed myself with a huge spicy overdose of chili when making a Tom Yum soup.  Now I'm a fan of spicy foods, and have a pretty high tolerance for chili, but even I had a hard time eating that soup, due to a couple of rogue, extra hot chili peppers that made their way into my shopping basket.

However, I didn't have that problem with this recipe, which was suggested to me by another lovely Postcrossing pal, who is from Thailand and listed this as amongst her favourite soups.  A few of the recipes that I found for this soup had ingredients in that I couldn't find at my local supermarket (Chinese Celery, coriander root) so I've had to approximate with some of the ingredients, but I think what I ended up with was rather special - if you like your soups a bit more spicy, you could aways add some more chili somewhere in the mix, and I'm sure it will be just as good, but I decide to play safe this time...

Also, after stumbling across the website of a soup company somewhere in Scotland, I've been experimenting this week with a tip that they recommend for getting the best out of any soup - that is, making it the day before and leaving it in the fridge to mature overnight which increases the depth of the flavours, or so they claim.  Now obviously, with this soup, a lot of the ingredients (fish balls and noodles etc) need to be added just before serving, but I did prepare the base of the soup the day before, and blow me down, but it seemed to be a lot more flavoursome than I was expecting.  I may experiment further and report back my findings...

Ingredients
1.2l Chicken Stock
2tbsp Dark Soy Sauce
2tsp Grated Ginger
2tsp Light Brown Sugar
1tbsp Fish Sauce
2 Star Anise
2 Cloves of Garlic
1 Small Mooli
Juice and zest of 1 Lime
4tbsp Sweet Chili Sauce
3tbsp Smooth Peanut Butter
300g White Fish, Skinned and boneless
Handful of Fresh Coriander
Rice Noodles 

Method.
 1.  Heat the stock in a soup pan, then add the soy sauce, ginger, sugar, anise and fish sauce.  Simmer and then add the thinly sliced mooli.  Let the soup cook for 15 minutes and then remove from the heat.

2.  Prepare the fish balls.  In a food mixer, put the fish. coriander, garlic, zest of 1 lime and a little salt.  Blend the ingredients together and then make small balls with it, about 2cm round - there should be enough for about 12 fish balls

3.  In a bowl, mix the lime juice, sweet chili sauce and peanut butter into a smooth paste.

4.  Prepare the rice noodles as per the instructions on the packet.

5.  Reheat the soup, bringing to a simmer and then add the fish balls.  Cook gently for about 10 minutes, until everything is reheated properly and the fish is cooked.

6.  Place some noodles in each bowl, then pout over some of the lime and chili paste.  Place some fish balls on top of that, then pour the soup around.  Garnish with fresh coriander and thinly sliced spring onions.  Enjoy!

 

Ceviche - Olympic Food Challenge : Panama

A man, a plan, a canal – Panama! And so we reach the end, the final dish, and like Usain Bolt, this one is a sharp lunge towards the finish line!  Panama had lots of dishes to choose from when I went a-looking, and like a lot of South and Central American countries, there was a preponderance of beef (There's a band name if ever I heard one...) but looking back on the dishes I had already cooked there was a paucity of fish (that will be Preponderance of Beef's first album...) so I plumped for this dish.

Someone asked me the other day how I got into cooking.  Thinking back, I was a pretty terrible cook for the first 25 years of my life - tinned curries, stews and cheap burgers were the order of the day; and then a few of my friends and I decided to do 'Gourmet Night' once a month and push the boat out, cook-wise.  It was great and I cooked more interesting dishes than I had ever done, caught the bug and now here I am, a moderatly amusing food blogger with a black pudding and dumpling obsession

But what does this have to to with the Olympic Food Challenge, I hear you yawn... Well, when I was doing Gourmet Night, there were two notable failures - one, the Sticky Toffee Pudding disaster, has gone down in history (n.b. Sticky Toffee Pudding needs flour in it, or it resembles brown snot; admittedly tasty brown snot, but it looks awful nonetheless)

The other disaster was ceviche, which was made with frozen cod and had the texture of boot leather soaked in lime juice.  And yet here I was again, about to attempt the same dish and make it look (and taste) impressive as befits the last entry into the Olympic Food Challenge.  And guess what, it was rather nice this time!  Having fresh fish is the key it seems, but the length of time you marinade it for is up to you.  Some recipes suggest as little as 2 hours, whilst we did it overnight with good results.

FaiKakai and Mango Pineapple Sorbet - Olympic Food Challenge : Tonga

Tonga is today's stop on the Olympic Food Challenge and, ummm, this was a bit of a distaster...  "What on earth could go wrong?" you ask  "After all, it's dumplings and we know you are crazy about dumplings Dan".  Well, a lot of things, it turns out - the sauce turned into toffee and set like concrete - and I have a slight phobia about toffee after losing teeth to the awful stuff.  Also, the dumplings more or less disintegrated in the pan, leaving a gooey, sludgy mess, over which I tried to pur the aforementioned sauce.

Now the kitchen is strewn with plates, dishes and pans that are glued together with toffee, and I am a bit cross for messing things up.  Bah!

Still - the sorbet was amazing..

Chicken Lap Lap - Olympic Food Challenge : Cook Islands

Today's dish is Chicken Lap Lap, which involved a few new experiences and ingredients for me.  Not least amongst these was using Taro.  Not even knowing what it actually looked like, we were quickly educated by a lovely man in Leeds Market and left with one huge vegetable.

The same trip also provided us with banana leaves , which again, I'd never used.  This was in some small way a voyage of discovery - which is appropriate in a number of ways, not least that the Cook Islands are named for Captain Cook, who planted a flag there and named them, erm, The Hervey Islands...

Anyway, the Cook Islands are kinda special to me as the aforementioned Capn' is my Dad's hero, and also, the starting point of his historic journey was, of course, Whitby, which is the informal spiritual home of the Soup family (in that we went there on holiday every year when I was a sproglet)

Anyway, without further rambling - Chicken Lap Lap

Papaya Pie - Olympic Food Challenge : Antigua and Barbuda

Antigua and Barbuda are today's stop in the gruelling marathon that is the Olympic food challenge... They have never won a medal in the Olympics, but are they down-hearted?  Like heck they aren't, sending 5 athletes to compete in 2 sports - athletics and swimming, so why not cheer your heart out for the plucky guys and check up to see just how well they are doing here...

Also, after last night, I'm feeling paranoid that I've put the right flag on the post.  It is a pretty flag though, isn't it? 

It's like sunshine on a plate... gooey, sweet and delicious, with colours that suggest a tropical paradise (Antigua is a tropical island isn't it?)  And yes, before you all shout at me or string me up from the nearest Mary Berry, I'm really bad at making pastry - even rolling out ready made stuff ends in tears, swearing and vows never to set foot in the kitchen again, so I used a pre-made pie base... Oh the humanity.  Anyway, if you are feeling more inclined to do this from scratch, I assume some sort of sweet short crust pastry will work well.

Today's new experience - Papaya. Apart from the crystallised stuff you get in bags, I've never had this before, and I have to say, it was pretty tasty, although there was some debate about how you can tell if it's ripe.  Mrs Soup, who has had more experience in this field than I have, got one that was spot on, although when they are ripe, the skin seems to go a rather unappealing shade of yellowy green...

 

Thai Chicken Noodle Soup

Snow!  Snow!  Oh blimey, you would think that the world was ending after a few hours of the white stuff on Saturday night!  I remember in ye olde times when it snowed and everyone would help each other clear drive ways and push stuck cars, but now it just seems to bring out the more petty aspects of people - moaning about the lack of grit for the roads, chuntering (good word eh?) about how to get to the shops etc.

Maybe it's just me getting old, but I really wish more people would enjoy the snow - it really does bring out the child in me - snow ball fights, sledging, staring drunkenly at orange sodium street lamps in the dark, watching huge white flakes drifting silently to the ground.  Who cares if you can't get in to work.  SNOW DAY!

At least my cold disappeared in time for me to enjoy Snowmageddon 2012, and allow me to go for a lovely walk along the frozen canal, before returning home to a lovely roast chicken.  And me being me, I couldn't let any single tiny bit of the chicken go to waste, so into the slow cooker went the flesh-stripped carcass to cook overnight for stock.

That meant that I woke up to a house that smelled delightfully of chicken, but also that I had lots of lovely stock for soup, as well as left-over chicken to use up.  So I decided to make a spicy chicken noodle soup.  I even experimented with clarifying the stock, by mixing 2 whisked eggwhites, 100ml of cold water and some chopped chicken into the cold stock, then slowly bringing it to the simmer, not stirring it until all the egg white floated to the top, bringing with it all the impurities from the stock, then I skimmed this off and was left with a rich golden stock.  I thend to water this down a bit before using it ina soup - about half and half, or the taste can be a bit too strong for my liking, but you can always play around with it

Anyway, with no more digressions, Thai Chicken Noodle Soup...

Ingredients
1.2l Chicken Stock
1 Red Chili
1 Green Chili
2tbsp Fish Sauce
Juice of 1 Lime
60g Roasted Peanuts
150g Broccoli Florets
200ml Coconut Milk
100g Thin Egg Noodles
Oriental Spinach Leaves
Fresh Coriander

Method
1. Heat the stock in a large pan, slowly bringing it to a simmer

2. Add the fish sauce, lime juice.  De seed and finely chop the chilies and add them.

3. If you are using uncooked chicken breast, cut it into bite sized strips and add it to the soup, if you are using left-overs, add them now as well.

4. Crush the peanuts in a pestle and mortar and add them to the soup, as well as the broccoli florets.

5. Cover the pan and leave to cook for around 10 minutes

6. In another pan, heat some water and cook the egg noodles as directed on the packaging.

7. Before serving, add the coconut milk to the soup and adjust seasoning to taste

8.  Add the shredded spinach leaves (or you could use spring onions) to the soup

9.  Put a serving of the egg noodles in each bowl, then top off with soup

10 Garnish with a few fresh coriander leaves

Beetroot, Lime and Wasabi Soup

Ahh, beetroot, stainer of shirts, pickled pink nemesis of salads, how maligned you are these days...

I'm a sucker for hard-luck vegetables - sprouts, parsnips and the humble swede, are, in my eyes every bit as wonderful as butternut squash, or whatever is the flavour de jour.  So here is a rather nice beetroot soup, which turns the rather ugly tuber into a thing of ruby red magnificence, a spicy and zippy little number that is almost as good as my sprout soup

This is a really light soup, and the coconut milk does wonders to counter-act the earthy flavour that puts a lot of people off.  It would work well as a starter or put it in a flask to take on a picnic.

Beware the fact that your kitchen may get messy when preparing the beetroot.  My hands were stained red for a few hours afterwards!

Hot and Sour Chicken Soup

I first had Hot and Sour soup in a restaurant and was a bit wary, due to my dislike of Sweet and Sour Sauce served in Chinese Take-aways (you know, that radioactive red/orange stuff that they all serve.  Where does it come from anyway? )  But anyway, I was persuaded to try the Hot and Sour soup and needless to say, found it rather lovely.

This recipe seems to be an American version of a Szechan style soup, on account of the egg and cornflour in it, which makes it a lot thicker.  There are a number of variations, for instance Tofu makes a good chicken substitute, or you could go the other way entirely and add pig's blood to flavour it! Or at least use pork as the meat