Local and Exotic

Since my trip in 1997 to Bangkok, I’ve been in love with Thai food.  Some of the meals we had during my ten days there came from hilariously translated menus, one was eaten literally in a dark alley with stray animals wandering around, some breakfast items with that ubiquitous red pepper paste threatened to blow the top of my head off before I’d even had coffee, and for many of them I didn’t recognize whether it was animal or vegetable on my plate; but all of them were utterly fantastic.  Fresh seafood, fresh ginger, coconut milk, lemongrass, green curry, red curry, coriander, peanuts, fresh vegetables, exotic fruits, puddings, iced coffees….pure gastronomic bliss.  I’ve only tried to cook Thai food once or twice, though, intimidated by being able to correctly balance the flavors.  Even pad thai from a box gives me pause.

So I was searching for a soup or stew recipe, something to warm me on a chilly January evening, and found The Best Thai Coconut Soup.  The reviews on Allrecipes concurred:  it really was the best.  Ha! you say.  Thai food is definitely not local!  Let me remind you that I’m in central Illinois in mid-January, and there’s not a whole lot of local fare to be found, unless it comes from my freezer.  But, sticking to my philosophy, I had to have at least one local ingredient.  Lemongrass?  Coconut milk?  Fish sauce?  Nope, not only not local, but not always easy to find.  But what I did find is a miracle:  local shitake mushrooms.  Grown right next to my beloved Triple S farm, the shitakes almost lured me to them in the refrigerated case at the co-op, Common Ground.  Solid, beautiful, and delightfully pungent, and the perfect reason to make this soup.

Another part of being a locavore is extending that philosophy a bit to buy local.  Lemongrass, coconut milk, fish sauce and red curry paste are all available at my supermarket, but I went instead to a local store called World Harvest.  The place is a crowded maze of every kind of ethnic food you could think of.  The people who work there will lead to you what you ask for, (not just point in the vague direction of aisle 7) and have amazing expertise.  I described my soup, and one woman helped me find all the ingredients in a matter of minutes, even telling me that the jar of preserved lemongrass was probably not as strong as the fresh, but many people seemed to like it.  Leaving the store, I smiled, happy to have in some small part helped our local economy.

So, click here for the recipe, straight from Allrecipes.com.  I followed the recipe to the letter otherwise, but substituted extra firm tofu (much cheaper and more environmentally responsible) for the shrimp.  (The recipe could in fact be made vegetarian, as I spotted “vegetarian fish sauce” at World Harvest.  If, indeed, fish sauce can be made vegetarian.  Hmmm.  Vegetable broth could be used in place of the chicken broth, but not sure how it would change the flavor.)  I rounded out the soup with a scoop of jasmine white rice on the side and doubled the chopped cilantro.  Local + global =delicious!