Sunday July 7, 1995

Tom Kah Kai - Chicken Coconut Soup

As it is now three week since I entered these halls I must be very busy. Can you imagine, I thought that I would be done for the summer and what comes up? I have to take a class in summer! Tears apart the whole summer. What's even worse, it's statistics, but I seem to get the hang of it. I'll go for an A.

But now to Tom Kah Kai. What we will need is chicken meat, either a whole chicken, breast, or drum sticks. Also mushrooms and galanga. You can get galanga fresh or dry, and both will work. I prefer the fresh (would you have guessed?) even if it's more work. Because if you use the dry kind it's already cut in pieces, but the fresh one still needs to be cut (hello nature - hint - hint!).

We will also need five or six stalks of lemon grass that we have to cut into two to three inch pieces, and some coconut milk. Beside that we utilize some of our standard ingredients like lime juice, fish sauce, cilantro and hot chili.

OK, here we go now.

Boil the coconut milk (if it alone is too thick you should add a bit of chicken broth that you saved from one of the last meals), and when it does, give into it the galanga, lemon grass, lime leaves and the chicken. Now allow it some time and let it simmer. I learned that this ingredient 'simmer' is one of the most important one for soups.

Then add the fresh mushrooms, (or if you can get Oyster Mushrooms from the Thai market that would be much better), fish sauce, lime juice, and (optionally) two or three pounded hot chili. No problem, you can touch them, they only get hot later.

Adjust the taste so that it is on the sour side and turn off the heat. Serve it with some cilantro on the top. There is one trick to give it an even nicer color, which is to add some oil chili paste. You can experiment with that.

This was just too simple, so I will add something else here. I got several requests for Thai ice tea, so I will just put it here to make life easier for me. I need all the time I can get for statistics right now - see above.

THAI ICE TEA: You will have to find Thai tea at a Thai or (perhaps) Chinese market that you hopefully have in your area.

Brew it just as you would do coffee. When this is done you add sugar (as much as you like and as much as you can without getting a sugar shock), cool it, add ice and pour non dairy creamer on top of it. This tea is dangerous, so be careful with it, it stains fabric and hands easily.

That's all for today, folks - C Ya!

Ingredient List: Chicken Meat, Galanga, Lemon Grass, Lime Leaves, Fresh Mushrooms (if possible Oyster Mushrooms), Coconut Milk, Lime Juice, Fish Sauce, Cilantro, Hot Chili, Oil Chili Paste.