Gang Keow Wan!!!

Went out on a bit of a limb...made Another Soup....kind of really knew that Pony would not be impressed with Thai-Inspired Veggie and Rice Soup and thought Fin and Mouse might also have qualms...but what the hey..faint heart never won fair lady!
We have to keep trying new things, not really because we can actually imagine what it would feel like to make something new that Pony turned out to like but because we are jaw-achingly bored at the prospect of a week filled with quesadillas, macaroni cheeze and tofu tart...all things that we like but they are coming around a bit too soon after we last ate them.

We had rather a leisurely start to the day and didn't have breakfast until hours after we got up - the children are working on their dolls house and were very busily scrubbing bannisters and carpets with old toothbrushes. We bought it secondhand on ebay a few years ago and reminisced to the seller how it was the same model of dollshouse that our friends had had when we were children and we had really coveted it. The seller had replied how thrilled she was to imagine the dollshouse being renovated and 'coming to life' again...about half an hour after it arrived it had come to life again: the DINOSAURS had moved in (the children were obsessed with model dinosaurs at that time) and utterly finished it off. Carnotaurs removed window frames and doors, Pachycephalosauruses tore off wallpaper and even the plant-eating Parasaurolophuses covered the bannisters and walls with wax crayon...
But now the dinosaurs are out of favour and languishing in a cardboard box somewhere and Sylvanian model cats and some dancing ladybirds have moved in and the children have been frantically making good the damage done by the previous tenants...Even Nelly helped by overseeing operations from the roof!
So when they finally took a break we had breakfast and were then running so late that I started making the soup immediately afterwards.
I have never had Thai food and nobody could remember what we had thought looked so promising about the recipe but it was too late to change plans so I started chopping and sweating (the onions, not me..). I left out a green pepper as think they are completely pointless - they don't look good (like red peppers do) and don't really add flavour to anything they are in..all it does is add 70p to the cost of the dish..
Actually, I just forgot to buy one...
The recipe had chopped greens so I used spinach as I love it and I used white rice instead of brown rice which I prefer...but that made everything start looking Ready a lot sooner than I expected (we only just finished breakfast!) as the white rice cooked much faster than the brown in the recipe so I had to quickly fry cubes of tofu to throw in. Another time I think I would season the tofu as Pony is the only person I know who eats plain tofu..but it looked attractive and was a nice texture.
It was tasting so good already - I've never used Thai green curry paste before and thought it smelled a bit ..musty? But accompanied by dried basil and turmeric it was lovely and so I was hesitant in adding a whole can of coconut milk and juice from one lime to it so I just sloshed some coconut milk in - about 1/3 of the tin - and the flavour changed completely so I didn't add more and the same with the lime. I only put in half the juice as I could taste it as soon as I'd added half the juice and didn't want the lime flavour to take over.
So it was all done as soon as the rice in the soup had cooked and we all tried it as we needed to know whether an alternate meal was required. Pony didn't like it but it got the thumbs up, unexpectedly from Fin and Mouse although Mouse was terribly tempted by Pony's tofu wiener and had to be furnished with one too...
I thought it was absolutely lovely and refreshingly different from anything we usually cook. The one niggle is that because the rice is in in the soup I can't heat it up and finish it off (we are very thrifty!) as the rice has gone mushy so alternatively, I could have done the rice separately and only added it as I served the soup.
And finally, your first lesson in Thai..Gang Keow Wan is Thai for green curry paste!