This Tom Yum soup is the ideal antidote for these frigid days – warm to the taste, both from the spice and temperature – and packed with the traditional flavors of Thailand. I’ve made a few variations and deviations based on what was in the house, but it’s a soup that bends beautifully beneath such changes. Instead of Thai chiles, I used a habanero. Instead of galangal I used ginger. Miraculously, we had the lemon grass and kaffir lime leaves in the freezer from a previous summer. Andy had a pound of shrimp on hand from a batch we forgot to put out for a recent family dinner. I picked up some mushrooms after work, and used some remaining tomatoes and a new bottle of fish sauce to round it all out. It was just the slightest bit too biting when I first sampled it, so I added some coconut milk to temper it – not too much… these are icy days and nights.
