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kitchen tutorial: chicken coconut soup (thom kha kai)
Another favorite Thai recipe from last night is Thom Kha Kai. I usually make this with shitake mushrooms, but had the notion to grab a can of straw mushrooms at the Asian market to use instead.

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Every time the power goes out and we must light candles, I think of what it must have been like in the days predating electricity. Candlelight is romantic, but it sucks when you want to read without eye strain. Our power went out last night around 7:30. At first, the electric company said it would restored by 10 pm. Jeremy was hoping so since his observation runs began around 10 pm. We lit candles and gathered ourselves into the office, which remains warmer than the rest of the house with the door shut. We were prepared to spend the night there anyway due to the racket caused by the windstorm. I used my headlamp for reading up on sights to see in Australia.

That wooden spoon in the mouth trick really does take the edge off of slicing onions. It’s the ethylsufine that makes your eyes water. This chemical is released when you break the membrane of the onion cells that keeps a certain enzyme and sulfur compounds separate. The two mix and hence the sobbing begins. Onions go in just about everything. Imagine life without onions. We would have sad stews, sad soups, sad non-onion rings, no mirepoix, sautés would be dull, lonely beef, lonely chicken, guacamole without that certain special something… And french onion soup would be reduced to french soup. Not to mention what would happen to all of those french onion dips: sad chips.

But that’s someone else’s life, not mine. Inspired by what Nathan made for Nicole (a geophysicist who cooks – you have to love that!) I revisted an old favorite tonight. I use regular onions, not sweet onions, because sweet onions taste bizarre to me in this soup and the sugars that already exist in the regular onions get somewhat caramelized anyway.

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