Tom Yum Gruh-doo [bone soup]

I have particular tastes in the food that I eat. One of the things that I like to see is the main ingredients treated fairly. By that, I mean that the meat – or whatever – should be cooked the way that suits it.

My parents used to serve brussels sprouts in a holy way [they had boiled the hell out of them] and those sprouts fell to one of the lowest positions on my “prepared to eat” list. By contrast, my wife cooks brussels sprouts by quartering them and stir-frying them with a modicum of oyster sauce, never over-cooking them. I like them that way, and will even buy them myself to get the wife to work her magic on them.

It might be worth mentioning that my wife is the number 1 chef at a Thai restaurant, and she really knows how to cook Thai food. Sadly, her knowledge of how to cook western food is somewhat thin on the ground, and that sometimes causes me some grief.

The restaurant where she works uses the best beef for all of its beef dishes, and as a result, she has come to the conclusion that all beef is equal. Topside beef is used for stir-fry beef. Topside beef is used for tom yum neua. Topside beef is all that there is.

I bring home some gravy beef so that I can make a stew, and she fries it. Then I get told that I should buy beef, not oxen or buffalo. Right! I bring home some round steak, and as likely as not, it will be made into some sort of soup.

I stumbled upon a chance to purchase some osso buco at half price about two months ago, so I grabbed 3 kilos which gave me 15 pieces. For anyone who doesn’t know, osso buco is a veal cut from the shank; it is cut across the bone, so you get a circle of bone and an outer circle of soup-meat. The cut is usually about 25mm [1"] thick.

I get this windfall treasure home and the wife takes half of it and fries it before I could tell her to leave it alone. I got bad comments and dirty looks for a few days after. I had bought tough meat, I was the bad boy. I explained to the wife that osso buco is meant to be cooked in a soup or stew.

Unfortunately, she took me at my word, and a day or so later, she took the remains of the osso buco and put it into a batch of tom yum – a sour and spicy Thai soup. I thought that I had lost the osso buco because my wife normally makes her tom yum with the authentic ingredients, making it too spicy for my taste. She left the soup pot to cool on the stove while she went to work, and I looked at it, wishing that she had not stolen my delicacy and made it inedible. I couldn’t resist a small try of the meat, so I grabbed a pair of tongs and dipped into the pot of liquid mystery.

The surprise that I got was pleasant. My wife had been in a hurry to make this tom yum, and had used a can of commercial soup as the base for the pot’s contents. It wasn’t as spicy as I had expected it to be!

My face gained a smile. And the tongs dipped into the pot again. And again, many times over.

While I can’t be certain, I think that I got all of the meat, leaving nothing but the bones. And I ate all that I got from that pot.

The wife returned home that night, dropped a handful of chopped chillies into the soup pot, boiled it again for another half-hour, then ladled it out into containers to put in the freezer.

Today, my stepdaughter and her cousin took a day-trip to Sydney to see the sights, my wife went to use her culinary skills at the restaurant, and I was left at home to take care of my two sons. I decided to feed them with a savoury stew that I would make from about 700 grams of gravy beef, potatoes and vegetables. They both enjoyed it.

Tonight, the stepdaughter and her cousin returned, hungry. I offered the young lad a serve of my culinary work of the day, which he readily accepted. The step-daughter re-heated the last of the frozen containers of tom yum, and poured it into her plate at the table. The young man reheated his plate and sat next to his cousin, and I compared the contents of their plates.

His plate was piled high with chunks of tender beef, diced potato, and a variety of vegetables.

Her plate contained a thin gruel of tom yum with a showing of sliced chillies, a lot of crushed lemon grass debris, and a pile of meatless bones.

I suspect that the lad has had an earlier serve of this batch of tom yum, and knows the side of the bread which carries the butter.

Do I feel guilty about eating the meat? Not the tiniest little bit. My wife is tasked with buying all of the food; she has her own substantial income and gets about half of mine to help pay for the edible goodies. I have the privilege of paying all of the major bills [power, phones, other utilities, council rates, etc.] with what I have left.

Tom yum gruh-doo = spicy and sour bone soup, that’s what I left them, and the girls didn’t know the difference.

I have given up bringing home meat that I want to eat, except what I can cook on the same day. It will otherwise be used in a manner contrary to that which suits it best, and I will be blamed for the meat being unsuitable to the Thai chef’s whims.

This is but one of the penalties one pays for living with a Thai lady. I don’t feel that I need to tell anyone of the benefits.

© Santa. All rights reserved by the author.