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.)