Month: April 2022

Cooking With Christie!

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This Week’s Recipe: Red Chili Paste

The Inspiration: While scouring all the Asian Markets in the area looking for lime leaves for last week’s tom yum soup recipe, my husband slipped a pound of Thai chilis into the basket…and for a hot second I was stumped on how to use so many before they spoiled. Especially since I didn’t buy any chicken wings (which I coat with a homemade sweet & spicy thai chili sauce).

Then I wondered how hard it would be to make chili paste – which lasts longer than the fresh chilis. This question led me to a recipe on LinsFood and I followed version 2 of the basic recipe.

The only change I made was omitting the candlenuts since I am allergic to every other kind – I didn’t want to risk it.

Christie: Honestly? I am not sure any of Christie’s sleuths would love this except perhaps Mr. Harley Quin (as love can be spicy) or Colonel Race (as he traveled so widely).

Cooking With Christie!

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This Week’s Recipe: Tom Yum Soup

The Inspiration: I am a fan of Guy’s Grocery Games on Food Network. Recently I was rewatching the Ultimate Spicy Games and one of the chefs, who’s from Thailand, made tom yum soup*. While watching her prepare the dish, I realized (so long as I’ve got more than thirty minutes) I can totally make this dish!

Turns out the most challenging part was finding the lime leaves! 

After visiting a half dozen grocery stores (my husband is fantastic), I finally found them – and frozen shrimp, which weren’t treated with sulfates! Which was a huge score! (Fun Fact: The sulfates help the little guys turn a deeper shade of pink when you cook them up.) 

Once I finally had everything, I used these two recipes to base my version on – one’s by Spruce Eats and the other on recipetineats.

Now, I stuck pretty close to the recipe for the broth, which was interesting. Because when I tasted the broth, before adding the veggies and the shrimp, I thought I had done something wrong. As the lemongrass and lime leaves made it kind of sour. However, after I cooked the veggies and shrimp in the broth – it transformed into the tastiest dish! 

BTW – I added a bunch of extra veggies to the dish because I couldn’t help myself: bell pepper, Fresno pepper, zucchini, and enoki mushrooms.

(*Of course, while writing this post, I rewatched the episode again…and discovered I did NOT pay very close attention. Patty, my inspiration, did not make tom yum soup – she made tom sapp soup. *sigh*)

Christie: Now, I can’t see Miss Marple making this for herself…However, if her nephew Raymond West had sent her to Thailand rather than the Caribbean for a vacation – I think she’d have tried it and loved it. (Especially since you can easily adjust the spice level.)