Happy New Year to everyone! I hope you stepped into new year with excitement, inner fullness and some thrilling yet achievable resolutions ✨
Also, happy Veganuary 🥳🥳 Although I don't often enjoy rainy, cloudy and cold Lithuanian winter, this month is a big mood booster during this depressing weather as many people approach plant-based diet during Veganuary and we can see much more attention to the vegan lifestyle.
Veganuary is a great way to familiarize yourself with plant-based meals, incorporate more vegan meals into your daily life and simply see that vegan food is sooo far from being boring 😃 So, in case you haven't started Veganuary - challenge yourself to be vegan during the month of January! If you are new to this lifestyle or it sounds too much to be completely vegan during this time - I highly recommend to at least try to include some more new plant-based meals in your cooking routine and I'm sure you will find some tasty and surprising discoveries 🧡
And today I also want to share a simple recipe of a Thai based soup which is a great meal for a cold weather if you are not super lucky like me and live in a country that is full of darkness, rain and snow 95% of the winter 😂 or if you simply want something comforting, simple and warm. 🍵
As a Lithuanian I am used to simple vegetable soups, borscht (beet soup), cabbage soup, etc... It got a little boring so I am now very excited to make soups that are not so traditional to my country's kitchen 😃
And this soup was perfect - it is still with vegetables but also has a nice hint of curry and coconut, as well as some freshness of the lime juice 😍 I am just getting hungrier and hungrier even describing it 😂
As always in my recipes - I want to simply show an example of a recipe which you could totally modify to your own needs. So, you can add any other vegetables to this soup, extra spices or other. If you don't have lime, you can also switch it to lemon (but lime is preferred here).
I hope that this 2023 year you will have much fun while cooking and trying out new recipes and what a great way to start the year with fresh and colorful soup!
You will need:
For about 3 servings
- 1 red pepper
- 5 mushrooms (champignons or shiitake)
- 1 onion
- 3 cloves of garlic
- 2 teaspoons of fresh grated ginger
- 400 ml. coconut milk (in the recipe I used "light" milk, but full fat should also be fine, if it is too thick you could add more water to the soup)
- 2 tablespoons of red curry paste
- 1 lime
- 1 liter of water
- 2 cubes of vegetable stock
- About 1 tablespoon of oil (sunflower, olive or other)
- Fresh parsley (this is optional - you can replace it with any other fresh, frozen or dried herbs)
- Optional: rice noodles. I love this soup plain but I also added rice noodles to one serving of this soup and it also fits great! So depending on how hungry you are, you can add rice noodles to the soup as well (I will explain more below)
Preparation
- Chop all the vegetables:
Onion and garlic into very small pieces
Red pepper into thin strips (remove the seeds from the inside)
And mushrooms into thin slices.
- Peel the ginger and grate it. It should be about 2 teaspoons of grated ginger.
- Add some oil (~1 tablespoon) to the pan and heat it for about 5 minutes.
Add chopped onion, garlic and grated ginger to the heated pan and mix everything.
Fry for about 3-5 minutes, stirring constantly until the onions are golden and soft.
Then add chopped pepper and mushrooms, mix everything.
Fry for 4-5 minutes (do not cook completely - leave the mushrooms a bit raw and don't let them get too brown and shrink).
Once everything looks somewhat like in the photo above, turn off the heat. - Put the fried vegetables in a pot where you will boil the soup.
Dissolve the vegetable stock cubes in 1 liter of hot water (I do that by boiling water in the electric kettle, pouring it in a separate bowl and mixing in the stock cubes. I find this more comfortable but you can simply boil the water in a pot for the soup). Pour the stock on the vegetables in the pot. Also check the instructions on your stock package, you may need to use less cubes for that amount of water.
Pour coconut milk to the pot.
- Heat the soup until it is hot, on the verge of boiling, and then turn off the heat. It doesn't need to start boiling, you are simply heating it. You will start seeing foam as it gets hotter.
- Squeeze the juice of a whole lime into the soup (half of a lime is also possible if you don't like sourness) and mix it in.
- If you want to serve the soup with rice noodles - I prepared rice noodles beforehand by simply pouring boiling water over them and waiting a few minutes until they are soft but check instructions on your package if you need to properly boil them over the stove. Then I put rice noodles without water in a separate bowl and poured the soup over the noodles. Unfortunately, I didn't photograph this process but I hope it is clear!
- If you are eating this soup without noodles, it goes very well with light bread, fresh parsley or other herbs, I also like adding some sesame seeds. Add more lime juice if desired.
Enjoy!
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