…and hot and sour soup of clams with chillies and lime (tom yam hoi nahm sai).
It’s been a while since we’ve done our supposedly weekly Thai Monday, so over the weekend we hastily chose a couple of recipes and bought what we needed to.
First up was Hot and Sour Soup of Clams with Chillies and Lime:
The recipe describes this as an “austere” soup because of its simplicity. It contains stock slightly seasoned with sugar and salt, and the clams are cooked in the stock until they open. Then add a couple of bruised chillies, a squeeze of lime juice and garnish with coriander leaves. Very simple, and distinct from some of the complex recipes that we’ve used in previous Thai Monday instalments. The chillies and the lime juice add their flavour to the dish, but just enough so that you know they are there.
The soup would be good served alongside something more complex. However, in our haste to choose recipes, we ended up choosing something that was similar in many ways:
The Spiced Minced Chicken Salad is a larp style salad, which generally includes minced or chopped meat cooked in the dressing and flavoured with dried chilli.
This too contained stock (only 3 tablespoons) seasoned with salt and sugar. We finely chopped a chicken breast with some garlic and cooked it in the stock until just cooked, before seasoning with lime juice, chilli powder and fish sauce and mixing in chopped shallots and chopped mint and coriander leaves. We sprinkled it with ground roasted rice and served.
Although we followed the recipe, I think we got the ratio wrong somewhere along the way and ended up with too much lime and too little chilli. I did add some more chilli to mine, which balanced it out a little better, but having two dishes that were both quite heavy on lime juice was a bit much.
So the salad wasn’t that successful, but that’s all in the spirit of what Thai Monday was supposed to be about: we wanted to explore different styles of Thai food that we hadn’t tried before, rather than just cooking green curry every time because as brilliant as green curry is, a bit of experimentation and horizon-broadening is always a good thing and some of these simpler recipes serve as history lessons as they often form the bases from which more complex dishes evolved.
Know what you mean about sticking to one recipe over and over. Like the idea of dedicating one day out of the week for a specific food- especially, thai 🙂
It’s worked well for us because it focuses our attention…we have a big pile of recipes we want to try out and often just randomly pick one but it can seem quite a daunting task to get through them, dedicating Mondays to Thai food helps it seem less daunting 🙂
Please. Where did you get the first bowl in blue and white that you show here at the top of the page? Thank you.
Tom, we bought that bowl at Oriental City which is sadly no more. However, the shop that we bought it from is re-opening in the new Pacific Plaza which we will definitely be visiting soon!