My new soul-food: Thai Coconut Soup

A friend was reminiscing recently about his love of a Thai soup he used to get in college. As he described it, I was able to guess that it was some form of Thai Coconut soup.

I was inspired to then try and make it at home cause it sounded delicious. Using this recipe from 40aprons.com, with a number of substitutions, I was blown away by how delicious it was, and it felt nurturing to me, like soul food.

The base of this soup is so fragrant that as soon as it was at a low simmer on the stove, each of the kids came into the kitchen curious as to what smelled so good!

I made the soup with chicken and tofu. Even with my pescatarian diet, I'm not a purist about it. I can cook for the family and take out the pieces of chicken that I won't eat. It's not a big deal to me, but I know others would draw a harder line.

I served the soup over rice noodles, chopped basil, and halved cherry tomatoes.

Oh my goodness! Was this ever delicious! The kids loved it too!

I have since made the soup again, this time experimenting further, adding more chillies, adding shrimp and tofu (swapping out the chicken) and serving over egg noodles and lots more basil.

This is now a new staple in my household. I get cravings for it and need to have it. It's that good!

Substitutions I made:

• I mixed low-sodium vegetable broth and low-sodium chicken broth (it's what was in the pantry)

• I wasn't able to find lemongrass stalks at my grocery stores, so I settled for lemongrass stir-in paste

• Instead of only 2 cloves of garlic (cause who really only uses 2!), I used at least 5-6 cloves

• I used 3 times the ginger portion too

• Instead of coconut sugar, I used icing sugar (I know weird choice, but it's because it's what I had in my pantry)

• I used lemon juice instead of lime juice (again cause it's what I had in the fridge)

• I used light coconut milk

Calorie count of my version would be more than that listed in the recipe due to the sugar and noodles. But I don't really care about the calories when I'm eating this soup anyways... it's that delicious and soul-feeding… to do so would ruin the experience.