Recipe: Thai Coconut Shrimp Soup with Spinach

image: mine

I was looking through the most recent Wegmans publication and came across their recipe for Coconut Spinach Shrimp Soup. I've long loved--and cheffed--Thai soups, but I hadn't seen one with spinach before, so I decided to give it a try. I had to tweak the recipe quite a bit as I didn't have any Thai Culinary Stock and I wanted to use fresh instead of frozen spinach. So here's how I put it together:

1 tablespoon olive oil (divided)
a little less than 1 tablespoon grated ginger
2 green onions, cut into two inch strips, then thinly sliced length-wise
about 2 tablespoons lemongrass (I used jarred)
32 ounces chicken stock
1 can lite coconut milk
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1 teaspoon dried basil
1/4 teaspoon dried red pepper
1 pound peeled, deveined and tailless shrimp
1 tablespoon lemon juice
about 5 ounces fresh spinach leaves
salt to taste

In a large soup pot, heat a half of a tablespoon of the olive oil on medium. Add the ginger, green onions and lemon grass, sauteing about two minutes. Add the next six ingredients (through the shrimp) and let it heat. (I actually turned the burner up to quicken the process, but watched to make sure it didn't break into a boil.) In the meantime, saute the spinach leaves in the rest of the olive oil until they wilt and add them to the soup. Once the shrimp are pink and cooked through, add the lemon juice, mix and serve.

Next time, I may add more ginger, green onions and shrimp. But it did taste very yummy as prepared above!