The Best Thing I Cooked Last Week: Thai Coconut Seafood Soup

It’s officially fall. Let in the cool breeze and bring on the warm soup. Last week this surprisingly simple and quick-to-prepare soup took the crown of “best thing I cooked” so I just had to share. If you’ve got 12 minutes, you’ve got time to make this for dinner tonight.

I usually take so-called “30 minute recipes” with a grain of salt, as they rarely take 30 real minutes to execute from knife to spoon. That’s why I looked at this “12 minute” recipe as realistically as an infomercial for 3-minute abs. It just wasn’t going to happen.

However, given that even double the advertised time would have been a welcome relief from more ambitious recipes last week, we were pleasantly surprised when the soup ended up truly being very simple and full of flavor.

The key to making this recipe so fast is the call for green Thai curry paste, which we just so happened to have in abundance. Tablespoon for tablespoon, not much delivers a flavor punch quite like it.

The majority of the prep time came in the preparation of the shrimp (and steaming rice). Shrimp are easy to overcook, so we carefully removed the shells before deveining our fresh catch. After the shrimp were butterflied we fit the shells back onto the shrimp to help seal in their flavor and to add some extra flavor into the broth. The shells were removed for good just before serving.

The rest is as simple as the single direction for this recipe sounds. Put everything in a large pot, simmer, and then enjoy the season.

→ Get the Recipe: Thai Coconut Seafood Soup by Grace Parisi of Food & Wine

(Images: Chris Perez)