Red Curry Soup

	RED CURRY SOUP

I love any and all Indian food, especially curry. Since there is a dearth of Indian restaurants in west central Minnesota, I keep my freezer stocked up on these amazing Amy’s vegetarian Indian meals. They’re SO good and addictive! (Find these in the Natural Foods section at Pete’s.)

But sometimes I just feel adventurous, so I tried my hand at improvising a great curry soup I had a few months ago.

Here’s what you need:

·         1 carton chicken stock

·         1 jar red curry sauce

Fun stuff to go in it. This is a GREAT time to use up leftovers if you got ‘em! I used:

·         A bag of prewashed spinach

·         A bunch of cilantro

·         A container of sliced mushrooms

·         A bag of julienned carrots

·         A bunch of scallions

·         A bag of bean sprouts

·         A box of rice noodles

·         A couple of limes

All I did was start the chicken stock boiling, added a handful of carrots and mushrooms, and once they were done I added a handful of rice noodles. Once the noodles were al dente, I poured in the curry. This alone was awesome! It had the lovely vibrant flavor of a great curry, but not very hot- so I knew the kiddos would eat it.

Here I’m going to segue into a blurb about tofu. I don’t eat it that often because, frankly, I don’t love it. But I know it’s really good for me and I feel pretty virtuous when I can sneak it into a dish like this.  The trick is to drain it. I got extra-firm tofu, and I drained off the water, layered it between some paper towels, and sandwiched it between a couple of plates with a can of soup on top.  After about half an hour, it had drained quite a bit so I chopped it up and sautéed it in some olive oil spray.  Here’s the evidence:

Once you have this broth ready, the fun part is deciding what you want in your bowl.

A little bit of everything, of course!

Then I just threw the hot broth and noodles on top to warm everything up!

When I make this again, I’ll use less noodles and veggies and more broth. If you don’t eat this whole batch right away, the rice noodles will keep absorbing the broth until you’re left with Indian hotdish.  Delicious, but not really what we’re after. You could skip the noodles altogether and this would be just as good. This would be a great way to use up leftovers like chicken, pork, shrimp, stir-fry veggies, or just about anything!  If you want your soup to have more kick, a sprinkle of crushed red pepper makes it divine!

Enjoy!

-Megan