Tom Yum Goong

Luckily I'm not Scottish so I avoided a calorific night of gargantuan proportions and went for a very non Scottish option of Tom Yum Goong -  which is a hot and sour Thai soup which can be made with either prawn, chicken, or mushrooms.  There are many recipes for this but here is mine.  There are a lot of ingredients but all of them pretty easy to get.  There are a couple of ingredients in traditional recipes namely galangal that i haven't used and i didn't use fresh prawns but had home made fish stock (fresh prawns not just for freshness but the heads are full of flavoursome fat).
The ingredients you will need are:

• 1 medium sized onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 sticks of celery
• 2 medium sized chillies
• 2 sticks Lemon Grass
• 4 spring onions
• 200grams of small plum tomatoes
• 200grams Chestnut Mushrooms (traditionally straw)
• 300grams Shell on Prawns
• Tablespoon of chopped ginger (julienne)
• Tablespoon of Kaffir lime leaves (preferably fresh)
• Tablespoon of tomato paste
• Pint of stock (I used a Miso stock cube and half pint of fresh fish stock) Chicken or pork will do.
• Tablespoon fish sauce
• 10 stalks fresh Coriander (use the stalks in the soup for flavouring the soup and add the leaves at the end)

The Process...

Stage One
Add the herby elements to the stock - roughly chop the onions and cut the celery lengthways in to batons and julienne the ginger. Smash the garlic and roughly chop and bash the lemon grass with the butt of a big knife to release the flavour (I don't bother cutting as its more hassle removing when finished)  Put the Kaffir Lime leaves in whole for the same reason)  I used the medium chillies (helps me manage the heat better and you get more chilli than heat).  Add the fish sauce and the mushrooms (depending on their size I put in whole)

Stage Two
The soup should be cooked for about 5-10 minutes until all the flavours have had a chance to infuse.  At this stage i would check the seasoning.  It may well need a lot of salt (you don't season stocks as the effect of reduction is to intensify any flavour) unless you have used stock cubes.  Also if you need it hotter for your taste you can add more chilli.  At this stage I add the tomatoes and the spring onions and cook these for a 2 minutes.

Stage Three
Add the prawns.  Be careful not to over cook these.  If the prawns are fresh its easy to know when they are cooked as you can tell once they have gone pink all the way through.  I would suggest no more than 1 or 2 minutes to heat them all the way through.  Shell on prawns hold their shape and flavour - they are more fiddly but the ones with shells removed will shrink to nothing very quickly.  Finally squeeze the lime into the soup.  Don't cook lime juice as it gets bitter.  Again add to taste.  I use a whole lime and make sure every drop is squeezed out - this really gives this soup the real zing!

Serving
Place the soup in a bowl and make sure you remove the Kaffir Lime leaves, Coriander stalks and Lemon Grass.  Sprinkle the Coriander leaves on top of each bowl and serve.  Tom 'Yum Yum' Yun Goong - a seriously tasty, refreshing and 'good for you' dish.

Top Tip 

If you want to make this into a meal then add some noodles