When I arrived in Portland and I didn't have a job, I set about job hunting (of course) and scouring the Internet for said chicken noodle soup. I didn't have much luck finding a recipe for that soup, but in the meantime I had lunch one afternoon with my mom and grandmother at a Thai restaurant in the Northwest area of Portland. My mom had recently been to the same restaurant with another friend and had tried their Tom Yum Goong soup and had fallen in love. So we ordered a pot to share between the three of us and it was FANTASTIC. I couldn't get enough of it.

A few weeks later, I was driving home from one of my rare trips to the office and decided to order some Tom Yum soup and a noodle dish from the Thai restaurant by my house. Fantastic again!!

As I have been cultivating a love of experimental cooking lately, and having long since given up trying to find the chicken noodle soup recipe, I set about looking for a Tom Yum Soup recipe. I found a number of them, which I printed out. The basic recipe is roughly the same in all of them - make a stock out of shrimp heads and shells with galangal (Thai ginger), lemongrass and kaffirr lime leaves - but the specific spices and vegetables that go into the soup itself varied from recipe to recipe. Tom Yum Goong is apparently made differently by different cooks in Thailand, so this didn't come as any surprise to me.

Using Pim's recipe as my base - being "authentic" Thai rather than "Thai-inspired" - I set about cooking up some of the soup today. I had most of the ingredients, which I'd picked up at the Asian grocery market down the street, but I didn't read far enough into Pim's blog to learn about the ever-important Nam-prik Pao (Thai chili paste) until a couple of days ago. So I substituted two teaspoons of some other kind of chili paste and a teaspoon of Tom Yum Soup paste (neither of which includes garlic or shallots, which I guess are important ingredients in nam-prik pao) I'd found and they worked well in a pinch. However, I'll be poking around the shelves to find the stuff the next time I head to the market. Pim makes her own, but that's just a wee bit ambitious for me... (By the way: Pim's blog, Chez Pim, is a wonderful read if you have some time. She was raised in Bangkok and writes about her Thai cooking frequently which, as you might guess, is endlessly fascinating to me.)

Anyway, overall, I was pleased with how the soup turned out: it was warm, but not too hot and the flavor was appropriate. And heck, even my dad liked it! Plus, it's made the house smell SO fragrant and wonderful. Nice little bonus. :) However, I think I need to simmer the stock a bit longer before straining and/or use more shrimp I because the flavor was a bit weaker than it probably should have been. That, and use less lime juice. But just because I had so much fun making it, I'll be taking my mom a little contanister of it tomorrow when I see her.

Next up: Tom Kha Gai (Thai Spicy Coconut Soup with Chicken)