Thai Style Noodle Soup - Now with a Free Rant!

This is one of my favourite dinners, even Rear Admiral Fuss-Pants the Third (Husband, 29 years old and yet he still looks at lumps of tomato in a sauce the same way a 3 year old looks at sprouts or cat poo) and The Boy love it. The Boy sadly is a culinary racist. After a controversial choking incident in Yo Sushi he has sworn off Asian food for life. I have lied as to where in the world Thailand resides in order to persuade him to eat this. Anything vaguely "noodly" is now from Thailand...

I was genuinely excited to share this and started planning out the recipe as a great deal of my cooking is a very inexact, off the top my head affair. I was going through it with an acquaintance, who shall remain nameless when I mentioned Thai Green Curry paste. Said "friend" accused me of cheating! "But if your writing a cooking blog shouldn't you be making everything yourself?" Excuse me? Make a Thai green curry paste, from scratch, just for a bowl of fucking soup?! Jog on jogger. I mean sure, if you were doing some fancy schmancy dinner party and wanted to float about in a satin nightgown, erotically pounding at your pestle and mortar for 2 hours thinking yourself très Nigella, then go for it. By all means source all the different and authentic ingredients (do you even know where you'd get Thai basil?! Neither Waitrose, bastion of all things foodie and middle class and the Chinese supermarket didn't have it!) and pound it all together. Just don't squinny to me that your soup had lumps and gritty bits in it. It really, really pisses me off that using pre-made ingredients is called cheating. Buying a cake, ready decorated from Waitrose (seriously, they are beautiful!) and passing it off as your own is cheating. Ordering a Domino's and claiming the recipe was handed down by a distant Aunt in Naples is cheating. By the logic of the cooking pedants then surely a tin of chopped tomatoes is off the list, or butter not squeezed directly from the teat of a cow by your own fair hand is cheating. Bloody Delia made a whole series, a book and a range of products out of trying to legitimise people's fear that they are "cheating". What really sticks in my craw is that the people usually accusing you of cheating are the self same people that eat ready meals or jars of pasta sauce on microwaved pouches of fusilli and WATCH a lot of cooking programmes whilst doing so. Grrrrr. DO NOT BOW DOWN TO THEM. Buy the Thai green curry paste, I buy Asda's own brand and its pretty darn tasty. Oh and you'll need a big, big saucepan for this, I use what I believe is called a stock pot - about £8 to buy new, and again I got mine from Asda.

Ok it's a long list but it's worth it...

Ingredients
(I'm lucky as where I live has a Waitrose and a Thai shop nearby, I'll give easy alternatives for any hard to find, i.e not in Asda, ingredients.)

1/2 a small jar of Thai Green Curry paste (or more for a spicier flavour)
1 finely diced Red Onion
4 Large cloves of Garlic - crushed, finely diced or grated on a micro grater
3 Chicken breasts - diced or sliced
2 Sweet Peppers - I like a mix of Orange & Yellow & Red - sliced or diced
1 bag of Bean Sprouts
2 Limes - juiced and zested
1 Bunch of Coriander - around 80g, use the stalks as well for real authenticity
2 stalks of Lemon Grass (You can omit this if you can't find it.)
Noodle's of choice - I like fresh rice noodles
1 litre of chicken stock made with 3 stock cubes (I like Knorr)
1 Tin of Coconut Milk
Light Soy Sauce
Palm Sugar or Brown Sugar
Sesame Oil or any oil you have
If you have it/can find it Nam Pla which is a Thai Fish Sauce (Asda has it)

Method

Heat a tablespoon of sesame oil (or whatever oil you have, I've used coconut oil in the past and it is delicious) in your pan and add the onion, garlic, peppers and fry for a few minutes until they start to soften.

Now add the curry paste and bean sprouts and give it a good stir, after a couple of minutes more pop in the chicken. Cook for 3 minutes and the pour over the chicken stock. Gently simmer until all the chicken is white, you don't want to over cook the chicken so don't worry about it being pink, if you slice it nice and thin it will cook very quickly.

Pop in the noodles (pre cooked if using dried) and coconut milk and give everything a good stir. Now we add our seasonings. A good slug of soy sauce and about 1tsp of the Nam Pla, it is quite strong, and about 1 limes worth of juice. Give the soup a little taste, you want it a little tart and creamy. Don't forget the coriander will be quite strong flavour so add it before adding any more lime. If not tart enough add more lime and the lime zest and balance out with the palm sugar/brown sugar if you want. I normally add all the lime juice, all the coriander and about a tsp of sugar. Bash your lemon grass stalks with something heavy like a glass bottle and then pop them in and simmer the soup very gently until ready to serve.

This soup started off light and delicate but over the years I've wanted a stronger flavour and so pop in half a block of creamed coconut as well as a tin of milk and now The Boy has a higher spice tolerance a whole jar of paste. Thai food should be a balance of sweet, sour, salty and spicy flavours so play around with the seasoning to find your own taste.

(The Husband has a better camera on his phone then me and has swanned off mountain biking so I'll put up a picture later.)