Raid the Freezer: Thai Style Curry Soup with Shrimp and Angel Hair Pasta

Adapted from Serious Eats "20-Minute Thai Red Curry Noodle Soup with Chicken" by J. Kenji Lopez

Coming home tired on a cold night, I realized that I had everything I needed to make a warm, fulfilling soup that didn't require a lot of brain power or prep. All of the main ingredients were in my freezer. I had fish sauce and an open curry paste in my refrigerator.

(I think the recipe would still be palatable without the fish sauce. Maybe some tamari or soy sauce added to the serving bowl would work?)

Ingredients
2 TBSP Thai red curry paste (for a medium heat)
1 tsp oil
5 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
1" piece of whole fresh ginger, about 1/2 a tsp
1 TBSP chopped green onion (optional)
16 ounces of mild chicken or vegetable stock
3 TBSP Fish Sauce
2 TBSP cane sugar
Juice from 1 small lime (about 2 tsp); cut frozen limes work great for this
15 oz Coconut Milk
2 TBSP grated carrot
7 oz (about 1/2 a box) of Angel Hair or Thin Spaghetti
1 Quart water for boiling
12 oz salad shrimp
leftover, cooked butternut squash (if you have it), in 1" to 2" chunks
fresh cilantro for garnish if you have it

Directions
This works best with 2 pots so that you can eat in less than half an hour.

1. Fill one pot with the quart of water for boiling the pasta. Cover and set on low/medium heat to bring it to boiling while you start the soup. No need to add salt or oil.
2. In the soup pot, add curry paste, garlic, and oil (unless your paste has a lot of oil) and cook about 1 minute, pressing it against the bottom of the pan and stirring. You want the paste to cook but you don't want the garlic to burn.
3. Add your chicken or vegetable stock.
4. Add fish sauce, sugar, lime juice, green onions, and ginger. My limes were frozen wedges. I put them in as they were and fished them out once they had softened from the hot soup, squished the juice out, and discarded the peel. This is totally OK to do.
5. Add coconut milk.
6. Stir or wisk to blend the ingredients. 
7. Add the grated carrot.
8. Reduce the heat to low and allow to simmer covered.
9. By now, your pasta water will be boiling and ready for the pasta. Add your Angel Hair, stir it around in the water once the noodles are soft, and use the cooking time to warm your bowls, pour drinks, and set your table. You want your pasta slightly undercooked!
10. When the pasta is cooked al dente, turn off the heat. Do not drain it.
11. If the shrimp are frozen, add them to the pot of pasta and water. This will thaw them out and cool the water to stop the pasta from overcooking. Allow one or two minutes for the shrimp to warm up. If your shrimp aren't frozen, skip this step.
12. Using a spaghetti fork or other slotted instrument, spoon the pasta and shrimp directly into the simmering soup base. The extra water (about 16 oz) from the pasta adds to the soup volume. When most of the pasta/shrimp has been transferred, you can discard the remaining pasta water, which should be about 2 cups (16 oz). I don't recommend adding all the pasta water to the soup because it will make the final soup too thin.
13. Allow the soup to return to a simmer, then turn off the heat.
14. If you have leftover butternut squash, portion it out into your serving bowls.
15. Ladle the finished noodle soup into warm bowl over the squash, garnish with cilantro, and eat.

I like this curry paste, which is all-natural and has low sodium:

Thai and True red curry paste costs a bit more at my local natural grocery store, but it's a bigger jar and very, very good. Plus, it's been open in my refrigerator for about a year and it's still good!

The nation brand Thai Kitchen is easier to find, likely to be on sale or have a coupon, and has 38% of your daily sodium per serving. It works fine, but my experience is that it grows moldy after being open in the refrigerator about 3 months.

The fish sauce, oil, sugar, pasta, coconut milk, and the curry paste can all be in the pantry for when you need them.The perishable ingredients for this soup can be kept in the freezer, even the limes, garlic, ginger, green onions, butternut squash, and carrot. One bunch of green onions is always too much for me to use up while fresh. I have the same problem with fresh ginger, which I don't personally love, but recognize as the ingredient that makes or breaks a lot of soups and other recipes, and powdered ginger just doesn't give the same fullness.

Limes are expensive in the Pacific NW, so when I can't use up a whole one quickly, it's good to be able to cut it into slices or wedges and freeze them. They stay good for a month or so.

One of the best things about the original recipe is that it uses plain ol' pasta. I loved that! Who hasn't cooked too much spaghetti, at one time or another, and not know what to do with the extra? Leftover cooked noodles can also go into this soup.

If you prefer chicken to shrimp, here's the original recipe with chicken related instructions: http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2012/10/20-minute-thai-red-curry-noodle-soup-with-chicken-recipe.html

Kale & Garlic Chicken Soup

Kale & Garlic Chicken Soup

2 TBL oil

5 cloves of fresh garlic, minced

3 TBL tomato paste

3 Cups homemade chicken stock*

1 tsp lemon juice*

1 lb fingerling potatoes, cut into 1” pieces

½ Cup shredded carrot

salt to taste

½ a bunch of frilly kale, chopped

1 Cup of cooked chickpeas

2 Cups shredded cooked chicken, mostly dark meat

This is one of those what-do-I-have recipes. I don’t have any problem with someone buying all the ingredients specifically to make a soup, but soup can be so forgiving and flexible that, to me, it’s the kind of thing you make when you are trying to make order out of chaos.

Chicken stock is something I pretty much always have on hand. I make it out of the bones of every roasted chicken, including rotisserie chickens from the grocery store. My freezer holds stock ends (carrot butts, garlic and onion trim, mushroom stems, ginger, celery surplus, and sometimes bell pepper seeds and membranes) and I always have bay leaves. To make stock, I basically use Alton Brown’s Bird to the Last Drop recipe, without adding the finishing details of the soup. I never measure anything! The chicken bones, vege stock ends, and bay leaf go into a pot that will hold it all, then I cover it with water and simmer it for half an hour. I let everything cool enough to handle, then strain. (If you are making vege stock, you get the richest flavor by letting it cool completely before straining.) I don’t worry about the fat, because it will harden in the refrigerator. I can scrape it before using the stock.

This particular stock gets an asterisk because it wasn’t normal stock. When I roasted the half chicken (for the meat for the soup) yesterday, instead of putting an inch of water at the bottom of the roasting pan, I used chicken stock. So this “stock” had all the drippings from a chicken rubbed with blackening spices and spritzed with lemon juice. Cold, it was thick and gelatinous. This makes an awesome base for gravy and adds that marrow goodness to the soup. Because the lemon flavored the base, I didn’t add any additional lemon. If using store-bought or plain homemade stock, I strongly recommend lemon juice or lemon salt with leafy green soups. It brings the tomato, greens, and beans/chickpeas together really well.

I’m going to admit that I used the scraped chicken fat from the stock to sautee the garlic. A lot of that fat was the red palm oil that I used on the roasted chicken. This stuff is super deliciously amazing and not to be wasted: Nutiva Red Palm Oil

1. Sautee the minced garlic in the oil until the garlic is aromatic, about 1 minute. Add the tomato paste and cook for another minute. Add the stock.

2. Allow the liquid to come to a simmer. Add the potatoes. Add the carrots.

3. Simmer 30 minutes or until the potatoes are tender (but not falling apart).

4. Meanwhile, cut up your kale and chicken.

5. When the potatoes are cooked, taste your soup. Add salt if needed. Add the kale and chickpeas. Continue to simmer on low heat, covered, for 10 more minutes.

6. Add your chicken. Give it just long enough to get warm, then serve your marvelous soup.

I enjoyed mine with some crusty sourdough bread. It had a full flavor, with sourness from the tomato paste and the lemon that worked well with the other ingredients. A lot of kale soups ask for chopped tomatoes, but I'm glad I didn't have any because I think they would have overwhelmed the tender little potatoes. It was also a pretty soup, thick with ingredients and pretty in color.

Bob's Red Mill Vegetable Soup

The time I followed the recipe on the package, I got mush. Maybe I didn't follow the recipe to the letter, in that it may have boiled, but -- mush? The mush became meatloaf.

There was still an almost full package of Bob's Red Mill Vegi Soup Mix in my kitchen, however. The first thing I decided to try was making soup again, this time soup that would not be mush soup.

This is a soup mix of barley, lentils, split peas, and vege pasta. The cooked down vege pasta was responsible for the mush factor. While there is a recipe on the back for creamed soup, where after the hour of cooking, the soup is blended mush, I didn't completely believe that the shorter cook time for the pasta elements had been factored in when creating the mix.

I looked to Alton Brown's advice on rice, and took elements from a great white bean minestrone recipe that I have.

1 Cup Bob's Red Mill Vegi Soup Mix
1 TBL Earth Balance non-hydrogenated buttery topping (coconut oil would be a good substitution)
3 Cups water (not stock!)

1 tsp tomato paste
2 large cloves of garlic, sliced thinly
1 carrot, cut into circles
1 tsp sea salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp dried basil
1/2 tsp Trader Joe's 21 Seasoning Salute (a seasoning blend similar to Mrs. Dash, list below*)

 Melt the buttery topping in a saucepan on low heat. Add the soup mix. Stir until coated with the melted fat.

 Add the water. Cover and simmer for 45 minutes on very low heat. Do not allow to boil.

Test a split pea; tender "al dente" but not at all chalky or hard is perfectly cooked for this soup. When ready, add remaining ingredients and cover. Turn off heat, and allow 5 - 10 minutes for the flavors to incorporate. Taste; increase seasoning if desired.

This makes a hearty, thick soup with a lot of chew factor. I didn't have any other vegetables to add in besides the carrot, and I'm glad. I think more would have upset the texture. The basic soup mix has what it needs for the foundations of a satisfying soup. It made a good main dish for dinner. I was happy that it reheated well in the microwave, for take-to-work lunch.








TJ's 21 Seasoning Salute (below) has muchin common with  Mrs. Dash - Original Blend .

Trader Joe's 21 Seasoning Salute ingredients label

*Onion
Spices (black pepper, celery seed, cayenne pepper, parsley, basil, majoram, bay leaf, oregano, thyme, savory, rosemary, cumin,  mustard, coriander)
Garlic
Carrot
Orange peel
Tomato granules
Lemon juice powder
Oil of lemon
Citric acid

Roasted Parsnip Soup

It started with this recipe for spicy parsnip soup: Jamie Oliver's soup.

Tired of the repetitious paring of coconut milk with curry seasoning and appalled by a recipe that makes enough soup to swim in, I restructured the whole thing. It becomes vegan very easily.

2 parsnips
2 TBL butter or high-heat oil (suggestion: sunflower oil)
1/4 tsp salt

1 TBL olive oil
1 Cup Vegetable stock (homemade)
1 can (15 oz) Coconut milk (Trader Joe's light coconut milk)
1 small red onion (about 1 Cup, chopped)
1/4 C celery
2 cloves of garlic (at least), chopped
1/2 a carrot
1/2 tsp dried rosemary
1/2 tsp dried sage
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp fresh parsley


Onion, garlic, and herbs are to taste. Feel free to use fresh herbs if you have them on hand.

Preheat your oven to 425F. Peel your parsnips (you don't have to, but it will make the soup prettier) and slice into thin (1/4") circles. Cut each circle again into 4. The faster way to do this is to cut each parsnip in half, then split the half lengthwise, then cut two longs at a time as if you were cutting half-circles. You want an end result of confetti sized pieces that will roast quickly.

A 9"x12", 1" deep pan is the perfect roasting pan size. Put butter and parsnip confetti into the pan and into the oven for 2 to 5 minutes, until the butter is melted. If using oil, skip to the next step. Remove, and stir the parsnips around so that they get a good coating of butter. Sprinkle with salt. Set a timer for 20 minutes and let those beauties roast. Give them another stir up during the roasting if you like. They should be tender but should not be soft; think "al dente".

Chop your onions, garlic, and parsley. Slice the celery. Cut the carrot into thin (1/8") coins. Half a carrot is plenty; just eat the rest! Proceed when the parsnips are roasted.

In a medium saucepan, saute the onions & celery in oil until the onions start to become clear. Add your garlic, and saute one more minute. Lower heat. Add your roasted parsnips. Add your sage, rosemary, thyme, and carrot. (If you are using dry or frozen parsley, add it now.) Add with vegetable stock and coconut milk. Stir.

Cover and allow to simmer for 20 minutes (already on the timer, how convenient!). Check your parsnips for tenderness. If they are not soft enough for your taste, allow another 10 minutes of cooking on low heat.

Sprinkle with parsley before serving.

From Food

This photo does not do this soup justice. Peeling and roasting the parsnips makes the soup a creamy golden tone, and the carrot coins create accent points of color without being flavor bullies.