palm sugar, lime leaves, tom yum kai

I wonder if I could tell palm sugar from maple sugar in a blind tasting -- don't have any of the maple around to try with. What in maple syrup is maple-specific, and what is boiled-down sap in general? The two taste quite similar. (However, a one-pound cake of palm sugar costs a dollar or two.)

So that's why recipes are written in terms of pairs of kaffir lime leaves: they grow in what I guess is a single leaf, but looks for all the world like a pair of leaves, one growing off the end of the other.

The tom yum kai recipe invoked chili-tamarind paste, which I didn't see in the supermarket, so I made some of that first. It involved a lot of deep-frying (garlic, shallots, dried shrimp, dried peppers), and I think my dried shrimp are shrimpier-tasting than Victor Sodsook's, so the paste tasted mostly of fishfood and friedness. Eh.

Not too much of it went into the soup, so the soup came out just fine. I used my stash of frozen chicken stock, fixed up with a handful of cilantro stalks (I might experiment with low-salt canned stuff, since chicken is not the prominent flavor here). The recipe called for oyster or button mushrooms; I used crimini, which turned out at least as wrong as it sounds. Straw mushrooms next time. The broth, anyway, was great.