Thai Green Curry Soup

I can’t say for sure what inspired this soup. All I can say with certainty is that I wanted to make something different from my usual bean & lentil concoctions. Add to that the fact that I had just read something on the importance of eating green vegetables which reminded me that while I do make an effort to eat vegetables, I don’t necessarily eat a lot of green ones. Red, orange, yellow, white – check! Green? Not often enough.

Perhaps this line of thought led me to one of my favorite things – Green Thai Curry. The Green Curry that we get at our favorite restaurant is not a soup of course. It is a dish of chicken and Green Thai Eggplant cooked in a Green Curry Sauce. It will often have either fresh basil or cilantro – whatever is available I suspect, either one fitting with the green theme.

When Husband and I make Green Thai Curry at home, we are not as particular about making sure that all of the ingredients that go in are green – but it winds up being a tasty meal just the same.

Authentic Thai ingredients not being the easiest thing to come by when you live in a small city on the  east coast of Canada, we buy our curry paste. Our preferred brand is Thai Kitchen – available in all the colors of the curry rainbow – Red, Yellow and Green.

We keep them on hand in our kitchen so that we’re always ready to whip up a pot of Thai Curry for dinner.

As for the vegetable ingredients – I made it colorful.

Before starting on the curry, I got a pot going on the stove to cook 1 cup of long grain brown rice. On to the curry!

First in the pot, some coconut oil and green curry paste. I gave the curry paste a few seconds to get fragrant, then threw in diced celery and sweet potato. I let that saute, giving it a stir every now and then, while I chopped a red bell pepper and a small zucchini. Once it was chopped, it went into the pot.

 

I can’t claim that I actually like spinach. I don’t think I care for any green that is cooked before serving. But, the nice thing about spinach is that you can hide it. Which is what I do.

I wanted a package of frozen chopped spinach, but apparently so did everyone else. If there was any left in the freezer at the grocery store, it was too far back on the shelf for me to reach. On a side note: The advantage of grocery shopping without Husband is that I don’t end up with giant bags of M&M’s in the cart; the down side is I can’t reach things on high shelves.

So I was stuck with whole leaf spinach. Plus, I was planning to work in a can of chickpeas which do not exactly scream “Thai food!” Solution?

Out came the food processor. I poured a little vegetable broth in with the thawed spinach & chickpeas and ground it into an nice little paste.

Into the pot it went, along with the rest of the vegetable broth, some Thai Fish Sauce, Agave Nectar and some Roasted Red Chili Paste (also Thai Kitchen Brand) because I saw it in the fridge and I really love the stuff.

I let that simmer for a while to make sure the sweet potato was nice and soft (I do not like crunchy/firm sweet potato in my soup or curry). In the meantime, my rice had finished cooking so when I decided the soup was pretty much done cooking, I added the rice and a can of light coconut milk.

I wound up with 8 containers of soup to go in the freezer for lunches. Not a bad hour’s work.