Tonight we went to Southeast Asia.

That is, I expanded my cooking repertoire to include more Thai food.

Will has a favorite dish at the Thai restaurant near his office, a seafood soup. (I don't know if it has a traditional name - it is called Seafood Soup on the menu.) It's your basic Thai broth, which is usually a chicken stock base, with lemon grass, chiles, and seafood - shrimp, squid, scallops, and mussels. We keep a bag of Trader Joe's frozen seafood (shrimp, calamari, scallops) in our freezer. I always have at least one Thai chile paste and currently have three. I also have Thai fish sauce, dried lemon grass, and chicken bouillon cubes. So I put them all in a pan with some water and got soup. Well, okay. I put the lemon grass in a little cloth teabag first, made a paste of the other base ingredients (I chose a roasted red chile paste), heated it up, added water, added bag and seafood. Half an hour to delicious soup. I also made coconut rice, a personal favorite, and salad with a Thai lime-based dressing that Will found on the internet. The dressing needs a little work. I think the recipe was written for the American palate, and Will and I like our ethnic food ethnic.

My apologies to those of you that I promised a post about our weekend. Ain't gonna happen tonight.