Tags
how to cut carrots into flower shapes, Laos, light soup, slow cooker soup, slow-cooker chicken, Thai soup, Tom Kha soup
Around these parts, we love our Asian foods! Maybe it’s because we are part Asian? … Either which way, we do appreciate a lovely meal that replicates a restaurant dish we like to order, at home. Who doesn’t love that? For the cost of one bowl (maybe two) of this delicious soup in a restaurant, we have an entire slow cooker FULL of it to eat as much as we can!
This is a brilliant one for the girls since we put in all sorts of veggies that they like to eat and new “cute” ones that they were eager to try, both raw and cooked! It’s a spicy-hot soup from either Laos or Thailand and the balance of heat, sweet and sour makes this soup special. We chose to add the heat to individual bowls since the girls aren’t keen on spicy foods.
To make this a bit more filling (although it doesn’t need it), we put three chicken thighs at the bottom – which is a nice alternative to putting a scoop of white rice or noodles. Traditionally, this soup is eaten with a bit of white rice at the end. It is a lovely finish to the soup and sops up all the lovely broth that you may not have gotten to otherwise.
The girls had this soup with a side of “panda rice” – with their new panda press they received from their Great Aunts and Great Grandma in Japan. If we are serving rice, they have been consistently requesting “panda rice” and we can’t blame them, it’s been fun for all of us to help them punch out the shapes and arrange the pieces of nori to make their little panda faces!
Tom Kha soup is very light but filling and a great way to get in all sorts of veggies!
INGREDIENTS:
- 4 C vegetable broth
- 1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, thinly sliced
- 2-3 inch piece of lemongrass, bruised with heel of a knife
- one 14 oz can of coconut milk
- juice of two limes
- 4 TBS fish sauce
- 3 chicken thighs, bone-in & skinless (about 1-1.5 lbs)
- 1/2 onion, thinly sliced
- 1 C bean sprouts, rinsed
- one package of firm tofu, drained and cubed
- 1/2 C snow peas
- 1/2 C snap peas
- 1/2 C green beans
- one zucchini, sliced
- one can of baby corn spears, cut into bite sized pieces (if you prefer to leave them whole, that is ok)
- one can of sliced water chestnuts, drained
- 4 oz of shittake, cremini or white mushrooms (whatever you have on hand or a blend of the three), quartered
- one small head of broccoli cut into florets
- two carrots, ends cut off and peeled
- 2 C of cooked, short-grain white rice
- Sriracha
- Cilantro, coarsely chopped
- Hoisin sauce