Thai-ish Coconut Fish Soup over Quinoa

I made a fun fish thing today. The idea was to make fish in a coconut sauce with mango bits. But it became a fun, complicated recipe.

Thai recipes usual call for a root called galangal that's similar to ginger, but isn't. I managed to find some at Whole Foods today. It was super expensive, but I only got a little nib, and it cost me 75 cents. It turns out that this stuff is quite hard. I have a nice knife that can cut through anything, but it certainly met its match! (The knife won, though.) Oh, and when I felt all proud of myself for finding "Thai ginger", I found out that what I got was probably the Indonesian kind, which actually tastes different from the Thai kind. Whatever. I got to use a fun new thing!

So, I made a broth by boiling carrot bits, shallot, garlic, sliced galangal, lemongrass stalk, a dried red pepper and a couple of drops of fish sauce. Oh, and salt. After 30 minutes of bubbling it tasted like . . . salted carrot broth.

Then I used my mortal and pestle to make a curry paste. It turns out that you're supposed to soak the galangal in hot water for a bit before using. Then it gets malleable, and you can cut it into little bits. So I cut up lemongrass, galangal and garlic, and I ground them up.

The broth wasn't getting spicy from the dried red pepper I had put in. So I fished it out. It was soft. I cut it open, and threw out the seeds. The seeds are the super, super spicy part. I wanted the coconut and mango flavors to get through, so the seeds went away. I cut up the pepper, and put that into the mortal and pestle, too. When it got ground up, it turned everything red. Thus, it was red curry paste!

(Hmm, I've been writing proofs too much. I'm not sure normal people use the word "thus" when writing . . . )

I fried the paste in a bit of peanut oil to bring out the flavor. There was a lot of liquid in it from the galangal, and so it lasted quite a bit in the pan and didn't burn. The fried paste went into the broth. Finally, the broth had a strong taste!

I was going to add about half a can of coconut milk I had left over from making oatmeal a few days ago. But, when I looked at what I had, I found that it was mostly coconut water . . . So, that oatmeal had basically a whole can of coconut fat in it. No wonder it was so rich . . . oops!

In any case, I dumped what I had into the soup. It wasn't quite enough, so I added maybe 1/4 cup of new, well shaken coconut milk as well.

Then, in went the fish. I used about a pound of tilapia. It was done super quickly. I got tired of waiting for it, though, and threw in a can of bamboo shoots. The bamboo is actually completely flavorless, so I hoped it would get some flavor if I put it in a bit early. After a while, in went a sliced carrot and the mango bits.

We were going to have the fish over quinoa. The quinoa wasn't ready, so the fish soup cooked a bit too long. That made the mango a bit melty. The mango pieces were super good, though.

In the end, I wound up with some sort of Thai fish coconut soup with mango bits. It was like a seascape. The quinoa was the ocean floor, the coconut broth was the water, and the fish was the fish. I guess the slice carrot and bamboo were the boats?