Tom Kha Gai, or Chicken soup with coconut milk and galangal 南薑椰汁雞湯

As home cooks, we tend to stay in our comfort zones and stick with the cuisines that we grew up eating. As a Chinese who spent almost half of my life in the West, I cook mostly Chinese food and bake western-style desserts, with occassional forays into French cooking. After all, the food of a people is like a language with its own distinct vocabulary that takes years to master. In this day and age, it's easy to pull out recipes of any cuisine in the world on the internet and try to cook up something 'ethnic'. But it takes years of living with the locals for a person to really know the food of a country different from his own.

I've always loved the food of southeast Asia with its kaleidoscopic melange of fresh herbs and spices. My grandma from my mother's side actually was born in Indonesia and my family always had a penchant for the spicy, aromatic cuisines of that part of the world. In Hong Kong, however, Thai food a lot more popular than Indonesian food. Most of the local Thai restaurants are not terribly authentic - they tone down the spices, the herbs and sourness for Cantonese people who like mild flavours. I've long stayed away from cooking Thai food since I felt that I don't have the necessary culinary experience and knowledge to cook genuine Thai food - until now!

I came across this cookbook by a Thai hairstylist called  阿泰 who has been living in Taiwan since 10. Even though he left Thailand at an early age, the flavours of his country stuck with him and he learnt to cook Thai food from his mother, who has sadly passed away. In fact, cooking Thai food has become something of an emotional therapy for him. It's a gem of a cookbook, with an index of common Thai ingredients and how to use them. The recipes range from familiar fair such as curry and tom yum kung to interesting dishes like raw shrimp in spicy fish sauce and sago meatballs. The book is in Chinese, and I would recommend anyone who likes Thai food to grab a copy.

Massaman chicken curry - first attempt at making my own curry paste!

I've made three dishes from the book so far: massaman chicken curry (see picture above), steamed fish with lime, chilli and garlic sauce, and this chicken soup with coconut milk and galangal which I'm sharing with you today. It's incredibly easy to cook so long as you can lay your hand on the ingredients. If you have a southeastern asian grocery nearby, chances are they'll carry them: galangal, kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass. One caveat: you really need to use fresh, rather than dried herbs! It summons up the fresh, herby, spicy mixtures of flavours that make Thai food so addictive.

Sweet purple rice soup with coconut milk 椰汁紫米露

In my earlier posts on congee and panna cotta, I wrote about how different colours in food often carry unique characteristics, flavours and connotations - that's why we're recommended to eat at least five different colours of food every day, right?

Well, I'm not sure many of us live up to that lofty ideal, but I'd like to introduce a sweet soup today made of my favourite colour: purple. It's interesting that there isn't actually much purple food around. I can think of aubergine (eggplant), but that's just the skin. I'm sure there're other purple ingredients, but it seems much rarer than other colours. Incidentally, the rarest colour in food has got to be blue, which is a rare pigment in nature. That's why we find blue eyes so attractive, right? A blue cocktail never fails to deliver the impression 'Caution! Is it really food?' (Am I alone in thinking this?)

In recent years, however, purple food has been all the rage. Think of purple potatoes and purple broccoli. I'm sure they have always been around, but the exponential growth in their popularity is staggering. Fifty years ago who would have dreamt of eating a purple potato or broccoli? The major factor in their recently popularity (apart from their catchy colour) is their exceptional nutritional values. Take purple potatoes, for instance: unlike white potatoes, they are rich in the antioxidant anthocyanin. This flavonoid has been shown to be an immune system booster and aid in the prevention of certain cancers, and more importantly, promote weight loss!