Friday March 17, 1995

Kang jeed ma kua ted (Tomato Soup)

But now here it is.

Tomato soup actually sounds pretty boring - but - wow - can it be made into something good.

I wouldn't start with the now evident facts that we need a source of heat and pans and pots to protect the ingredients from too much of that heat (I think nobody would get the idea to through tomatoes into the fire to make a soup, or would one?), so we take this as a given from now on .... except in the future I have some more philosophical thought on pots and pans.

The whole adventure starts with about one pound of meat, chicken, pork or beef or a combination thereof. And we need this ground up. I just have a deja vu because this also starts up with oil in a pan in which we sautee the meat together with some garlic. (We have _lots_ of vampires here so we need lots of that stuff.) Boy, this smell - I'm getting hungry again. But let's continue.

We stir the meat and the garlic until it's nicely cooked and then we add the tomatoes that we cut into smaller pieces. Sautee-ing (?) continues until the tomatoes just start to fall apart.

I hope you kept some broth from the last time you cooked a chicken. Did you? OK, if not you can also take some commercially available chicken or vegetable broth. Bring up this broth to boiling and then add the whole content of the pan with all the sauteed meat, garlic and tomatoes to it. After it comes back to the boiling point the taste fine tuning is in order. I use soy sauce for saltiness, some sugar or other sweetener (but please don't use any of these chemicals like sweet'n low - they are pure poison and by the good old rules of yin and yang they really make you fat) together with the fish sauce for this special Thai taste. Be careful with that soy sauce - it's so difficult to get it back out once it's in. It's so much easier to add some more later if you want it more salty.

And now the eggs. Two of them. We need them stirred up in a bowl first and then we let them drop slowly into the boiling soup while making wild vortices in the soup. The idea is not to have the eggs clumped, but instead as finely distributed as possible.

That's pretty much it. After the egg is all cooked, which just takes a minute, you can turn off the heat, possibly add some fresh cilantro or chopped onions over the soup after filling the bowl from which to enjoy it.

Hmm, get your nose close over the bowl and experience it with all your senses. (:-0}