79. Simple chicken tomyam with vegetables

• March
• 28

9:44 am Bird of a kind, Home Cooking, One pot dinner, Spiced it up

Almost everyone in Malaysia had eaten their fair share of tomyam, I would believe. This is one of the dish that could be soothing (and spicy and the same time), or tasteless and thin and everything that is yucky. Yes, you would get bad tomyam sometimes, though I don’t know how anyone could have mucked up tomyam since good paste could easily be bought at any local supermarket.

Anyway, I bought this tomyam paste in Thailand on one of our journey there. Oh, I know that I could easily get one here, like I mentioned earlier. But I usually would not think of getting one until we reached home. It just so happened that the husband stopped by one store to buy a sack of beras siam, and I mentioned that I wanted some tomyam and chilli paste to go, too. He just plainly picked the one suggested by the storekeeper, and both of ‘em bears the halal logo, too. Great.

And how does it taste like? Good. Very good, indeed. It has all the necessary ingredients to make a good tomyam paste : spicy and sourish. One need not add anything else to it apart from adding vegetables and meat or seafood of choice.

I also asked the husband to get me some chilli paste. Not chilli sauce, mind you, and not sriracha, but chilli paste. It is spicy with some sweet undertones, just some, not much. Good for grilling, and I used it with the tomyam paste for that extra zing. The paste is so thick inside a can. So thick and dark red, I need to check whether they add sugar or honey during cooking to get that color.

We usually would eat this tomyam soup with plain white rice and few other accompaniments, like fried chicken and vegetables. And also sambal belacan!

SIMPLE CHICKEN TOMYAM WITH VEGETABLES

Ingredients

• 400 bite-sized chicken pieces
• 250g medium shrimp, cleaned
• 1 can straw mushroom, drained, halved
• 3 tomatoes, quartered
• 1 onion, sliced thick
• 4 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 stalk lemongrass, crushed
• 10 (or more) birds eye chillies
• 4 TB heaped tomyam paste
• 1 TB heaped chilli paste
• 4 TB fish sauce
• 1 tsp sugar
• 500L water

Method

1. Put the water inside a wok/pot. Bring it to a boil, then add the crushed garlic cloves, lemongrass, the tomyam paste and chilli paste.
2. Turn the heat down, let the soup simmer for about 10 minutes, then add the chicken pieces. Cover the pot, and let it cook for further 15 minutes, or until the chicken is almost cooked.
3. Then add the shrimp, straw mushroom, onion and tomatoes to the soup. Let it simmer for five minutes more, then add the bird eye’s chillies, fish sauce and sugar to the mix.
4. Take off heat.
5. This is good served with rice and noodles.