How to Make Tom Kha Soup When your Mother has Inoperable Stage IV Cancer

This is a recap of an earlier soup recipe for Tom Kha Ghai. But honestly, each time a recipe is created it has a unique situation which calls for individual tweeks. I thought that it might be both educational and useful to document one of these particular situations. 

In this case, I will be making this particular soup while changing the prep and the ingredients to align with a diet recommended by certain holistic practitioners for those battling cancer. That is, I will be creating the recipe without adding any alcohol, sugar,  meat, salt, or chilies. 

Hopefully it does not completely suck. 

This recipe is particularly good when you’ve just prevented your mother from possibly going ballistic on helpful nutrition shop owners who are trying to sell her other options not on her list while she was already sliding past her level of comfortable overwhelm and you are trying to calm yourself down from a future ensuing anxiety attack. 

This recipe will call for drinking more wine, overall, than one would normally. If it isn’t going in the soup, that doesn’t mean it‘s not going to be used. Basically you’re drinking a recipe’s worth. If you don’t drink, be prepared to pour out at least one full bottle of wine onto the ground. Tell yourself that it's for the homies. And by homies I mean that it's to honor people in various homes who also have cancer and can't drink this wine.

This time it's okay for you throw the remaining wine bottle against something hard in order to hear the crash. 

Everything has to be organic and there will be no oil to sauté anything. Also, there will be no chicken. This might be closer to the Martha Stewart recipe I ripped into a few posts back when I initially wrote a blog about this particular soup and highlighted how boring and super New-England-white-person her specific recipe was. But maybe she was writing for her family member who not only had cancer, but also an unusually high ability to process sodium while having said cancer. If so, my apologies Martha. I honestly did not know your sodium deficient mom had cancer when you put that one up. 

Chop the fresh turmeric, onions, ginger, celery, lemon grass, and broccoli into smaller pieces than normal.  I mean seriously small bits. Try to breathe a little more consciously as you do this. Normally I’m all about "health at any size", which includes raggedly mean chunky bits along with some scattered smaller bits and then the occasional small slivers that just happen when I chop. But, since there is no soup base, I’m chopping everything teensy in the hopes that my hand will stop shaking and that it might add more flavor. 

I’m adding one metric fuckton of ginger to see if this will fix the lack of soup base and salt.  Also, because Whole Foods in LA apparently has received a written cease and desist letter from Martha around carrying galangal. It seems that her vicious galangal interaction has caused her to banish all galangal from the area. The woman does need therapy. It's not the galangal's fault. It's the behaviors and habits of those who raise and use galangal who end up causing it to go bad.

After chopping the items, take a slice of frozen pizza recently heated and eat it slowly over a period of 20 minutes while staring out the kitchen window into the yard of your mom’s small condo all while thinking about your sister’s earlier conversation with you where in she tried to talk to you about dividing up your  mom’s stuff and then you hung up on her.

 Continue to chew slowly until you feel sad and vacant

Chop up a larger than normal amount of parsley. It's parsley because partially you're not sure cilantro is on the cancer list of okay to eat items and partially because some people think cilantro tastes like soap. Contemplate if they are just faking this to be assholes and wonder why they have been eating so much soap. Fail to chop it too finely, but throw it in the large bowl of chopped things anyway and then proceed to sit with your head resting in your hands while your elbows rest on the cutting board. Hold this position until you can breathe again or until a relative walks in the room and you have to fake it.

Realize that writing this blog while you are cooking is amplifying your feelings. Try not to cry while chopping the fresh basil. If you fail to prevent this, cry over the sink away from any crucial ingredients. Remember, any added salt is not allowed in this specific diet.

Unlike other times when you put together a recipe for the family and everyone tried to crowd in to either insult you while standing around or pretend to help while not actually helping, no one will actually be in the kitchen. Everyone will just be too overwhelmed with their own shit and will have retreated.

Chop the bok choy and the majority of one of those large containers of basil. 

Nothing can be sautéed because you can't use oil, so nothing needs to be cooked separately. Everything gets thrown into the large bowl once chopped. 

Pour one can of coconut milk and an extra tiny can of coconut cream into a large pot, because you aren't sure how to compensate for the lack of oil and because... Fuck it.

Add more than a reasonably normal amount of garlic cloves which have been finely chopped to the mix. 

 Add the juice of two lemons partially squeezed. Some seeds may have fallen in. Don't worry. When these cook for an hour everyone will think they are some kind of unusual legume.

Heat the coconut milk and add four cups of water in a large pot. When it has reached a rolling boil, turn the heat down to simmer and throw everything you’ve chopped into the water. 

Cover it over and wait since there is really nothing else you can do.

Walk away from it and hope for the best.

Cooking for a Rock Star

It’s very important no one know I have gotten a cold, which is why I am blogging about it.  And my guts are churning because I have ten tons of Dayquil in my system in order to prop myself up.

You see, I have to cook dinner for Amanda Palmer and 50 other house guests who will all be occupying my living room in three days. There is no wussing out. There is no backing down. There is only go.

I’m trying to pre-prep and freeze most of the food ahead of time because there is no way I am going to be able to make everything that same day and live. I have, as per usual, made everything way too complicated.

Pretty much this entire recipe I am doing today is ripped from the Vegan Soul Kitchen, except that I forgot to buy thyme. But, you know, basil is green, too so it should be all good.

https://www.facebook.com/vegan.soul.kitchen

Cooking on cough medication is not unlike cooking while drinking alcohol. Though there is a more floaty feeling and everything seems to remind me of square balloons particularly when I have my eyes closed. Go ahead. Try it! And this works even better with Nyquil while you are trying to masturbate.  You end up fantasizing all your lovers are square and balloon shaped which may either be a good thing or a bad thing depending on who you are and what you are into.

I don’t even know who I am or what I am doing. Should I be cooking? Should I ever be cooking is really the question most of you are probably asking.

Today we are making a rockin’ BBQ sauce. It will be boiled and frozen to kill any viral or bacterial contents which may currently be spewing from my being while I pray to the gods of all that is sickness that I will be healthy tomorrow.

You do know that many of the people that prepare your foods in restaurants are sick, right? There is no paid sick time for line cooks. And I hate to break it to you, but most of your waiters are either drunk or on acid.

Maybe acid is passé these days. I had a friend who was a server and he told me that he always took a little bit of mushrooms before going on shift each night to make the evening “sparkle” a little.

Normally this worked well, until one time he munched on too many while harvesting them from his basement. You know, pick a few, eat one - pick a few, eat one.  After so many, he became paranoid that every car that went by his house was a cop car and he went for his gun.

Anyways, when making bbq sauce for 50 people and a Rock Star, it is important to make a lot. Like – a lot a lot. Like enough to fill up a large rice cooker. And this is really quite a lot when you see it in front of you.

And do you have any idea how slow tamari sauce is when it pours out of the bottle and you are praying that it will make up four cups to throw into the giant pot you have in front of you?

Oh fuck this. I’m going to bed.

Thai Coconut Soup with More Expensive Wine plus an Open Letter to Martha Stewart.

Today I went for a St. Supery Fume Blanc to start off with. I thought it would be good to push the edge of the cheap wine rut I had been stuck in for a while. Actually, it tasted a bit like  Boone's Farm, but without all the sugar and costing more than three dollars. Also, it tasted good. You know what I mean. The taste of all those pears, cherries and apples but without the urge to light it all on fire from the bottle while pouring it over a six pack of Hostess Twinkies.

 Expensive wine is like that.

With Thai Coconut Soup it is important to remember that any vegetable can be thrown into this thing. Thai people are not as strict on the proper veggie mix as Caucasian people who write Thai recipe books like to pretend that they are.

Since we are going for authenticity I am going for whatever is in my fridge that might spoil. I have corn on the cob which I will cut off the cob, red bell peppers, portobello mushrooms, purple cabbage, small potatoes, spring onions, and broccoli. It's all going in.

Now I *did* go to the store. When I bought the wine, I also bought a few things one might really want to have to have on hand just in case you want to make this actually work out for you. These included; coconut milk, fresh cilantro,  serrano chili peppers, basil leaves, garlic, limes, and a soup base.

I tried to buy lemon grass and kaffir lime leaves but the local Pac 'n Save is only hip enough to carry $15 wine on a discount. That's about it. To make up for the lack of the necessary items I bought a concentrate Thai green curry paste.

It'll do, pig. It'll do.

 I mean, really, if you were actually going to go all authentic on it's ass you'd have started with a ham bone and you didn't, did you?

I didn't think so.

Anyway, I already own powdered galangal. You can use regular ginger but that shit is not the same thing at all. Not to say that ginger is not awesome. It is. It really is! But it is just not the same thing.

 And you, Martha? You didn't even tell them to include ANY ginger what-so-ever? What the hell kind of soup are you making?

I think middle America can handle a little ginger. I know that you've been in jail and you want to protect others from the kinds of things that you've seen. You know, I once caught a galangal by the tail and tried to extract the pungent spice from its scent glands. I can say in all honesty that it wasn't pretty. Have you ever expressed an ass of a wild dog with razor sharp canines? Well neither have I. But ginger is pretty safe even if it causes you some PTSD episodes. Leave in the ginger, for god's sake. Breathe and repeat this affirmation with me! "Just because it smells similar doesn't mean it's going to bite you on the cooter."

 BTW,  I know I told you all to be creative, but what the fuck is up with an english cucumber as a garnish on a goddamn Thai soup? Really, Martha? And Fuck You with your lemons! This isn't Goddamn British Codfish.  And, you didn't even say to add ANY peppers.... ? At all? The curry paste isn't going to carry itself, you know.

Now, it is up to you to tweek your recipe. You could put chicken in there or pork or cow or tofu or peanuts. Today I am not doing any of that. But YOU could. It's just that kind of soup. I encourage you to go crazy with it. Just be careful.

But first, the garlic.

You really must use fuckloads of garlic. I enjoy the use of a garlic press. Some say this is not necessary. Some say that this is cheating. To those people I say; Fuck you! And for those of you who want me to tell them exactly what a "fuckload" is, I say;   Here at "Many Much Cookings of Greatness," we don't infantalize our readers like those lackeys over at say..... Martha Stewert's blog do.

 Just sayin'.

After you press the garlic in the pan, you should chop up some onions. I am using spring onions. You can use whatever the hell onions you want.

I *do* have sesame oil on hand. It's way better than that crap Martha Stewert told you to fry up onions in and it's really cheap so long as you just go to an any regular asian market instead of Whole "Ooops! I-Fucked-Ur-Rent- Budget-Up-So-Now-You-Have-to-Eat-At-Soup-Kitchens-For-The-Rest-Of-The-Month!" Market.


You will want to gut and chop your serrano chili peppers while wearing gloves unless you like hella seeds in your soup and you want your ass ring to burn like fire at regular intervals in the day. You should know by now about the gloves and that no amount of Vaseline will take the burning away until you've cried enough salty salty tears over your hands.

Actually, I didn't wear gloves.

And I kept all the seeds in unlike all you pussies.

Now here is where the sesame oil comes in. Put that shit in the pan. I don't know how much,  just put it in there. You want enough to saute some crap. I think you can handle eye-balling that amount? You know how to saute, right? Ok! Do that thing that that thing entails! You Go! I believe in you!

By now you will be done with the chopping and the saute-ing. It is time to fill a large pot with water and cause it to boil!

YEEE-Haww! Beers, Steers, and Queers!
(shhh... do a little dance here.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyGp98Xoq9g&feature=related

Once it boils, put your entire can of coconut milk in along with the juice of three or four limes. Put a teaspoon in of galangal, or not. Put in enough soup mix for the water, and then add a healthy few flings of the green curry paste. Add your saute'd stuff in and then realise! "Oh NO! I forgot the soy sauce!" So add that, too. Put all liquidy boil-ey things into the larger pot with all the chopped and waiting veggies. Add more water until the pot is kinda full and then add half the cilantro you bought.

Now it's full!

Put a lid on it and set it to low/medium. Add another lime. Add some more galangal, but only if you can stand the pain. Also, throw in a glass of the wine. It's like christening a boat!

But please! Without the broken glass!

You did refrain from throwing glass in there, didn't you?

Oh Shit! There is no time! The basil! Put the basil in! Now Now Now!

 That......... was close!

Martha, why did you tell them to just add basil as a simply a garnish? Are you afraid of basil, too?

You know that it has none of the agitated spiciness of galangal, right? I've worked with people from the prison system. I know that it does funny things to people. Are you becoming one of those folks that believes cornstarch and catsup are enough?

It's not enough, Martha.

 Just because cornstarch causes things to  have the consistency of cum does not mean that it automatically contains protien! You have to listen to me and hold my hand.

Just try to say this with me: "Items that might not go into pruno are still worth cooking with. Items that might not go into pruno are still worth cooking with!"

 Please! We can work through this together.  I'm a professional. Just trust me enough to take this dried galangal. I swear it won't bite.