• 1 can of chicken stock
• 1 carton of vegetable stock
• Enough water to make up the volume to however many people we were thinking it was going to serve...

You can probably get away with using water, really! We just used this stuff because we happened to have it in the cupboard...

We boiled this up, and then added:

• A couple of carrots, sliced up
• A few onions, chopped into wedges, I guess. It probably doesn't matter too much what they look like, they'll probably disappear before you get to eating the soup.
• Some ginger. a big marble sized knob, chopped however. I think I slivered it, hoping they'd disappear so I wouldn't bite into a huge chunk. Could probably have put in some more...

We probably added some or any of these (I think Decay would've put at least 2 of the three in but I didn't see - I was chopping up other stuff)

• a dash of worcestershire sauce
• a dash of soy sauce
• lots of cracked pepper

I think we went shopping at this point... or maybe we didn't. I don't know.

At about this point, we figured we'd better turn it into a sort of asian style soup... I went looking over at www.everything2.com (my alternative information source - more entertaining than going googling ... ) for soupy recipes ... and figured that we could possibly turn this into a vague kind of tom yam soup ...

So, I looked in the cupboards, and added:

• some lemongrass and chilli spice (which really did nothing - this spice is really quite unspicy... we didn't buy it though - b, em and jules gave it to Decay at his housewarming) - this was to make up for the sticks of lemongrass that we were supposed to add to the soup. Occasionally we actually do have lemongrass in the kitchen, but not lately... you'll remember that the lemongrass made an appearance in the other thing I've thrown together that didn't taste too bad - salad! yay!
• some more ginger - this was to replace the galangal (which is much stronger, and different flavoured), but I reckon we could've put in a bit more.

This boiled for a couple of hours or something.

When it got closer to serving, we put in:

• one chicken breast, chopped into cubes just over 1cm x 1cm x 1cm.
• A couple of whole chillis, bruised so they would give out some of their inherent chilliness to the soup.
• The juice of one lime. They also wanted lime leaves ... but I don't think we have a lime tree out back to conveniently defoliate ...

At the point when the chicken was cooked, I had a bit of a taste of the soup. One lime was seriously not enough sourness... so ... I did a bit of a test ... one spoonful of soup, a couple of drops of sushi vinegar .... that works!

• A fairly large splash of sushi vinegar was added at this point to the soup, and another taste test - still works!

When it was nearly time to serve, we added this stuff:

• Some snowpeas, with attempts made to de-string them. Sort of.
• Some peas, because I had poured out too many for the tofu thingy
• One sachet of the 'Asia @ Home' Thai chilli jam that came in the post to my parents place, except they thought I'd bought it and brought it in and left it at their place so they gave it to me.
• a couple of tomatos, sliced into vague wedges.

The original recipe actually wanted coriander as well, but like either of us was going to put that in!

Stir that around for another couple of minutes and it's about done (:

This was very much a guess and taste soup. If you want the recipe that I vaguely based it on, look up 'tom yam' and knock yourself out ...

See, I don't cook, I just chop things up ... a lot. Does soup count as cooking?

A better way to do this would be to do your own vegie/chicken stock, but we didn't have all day... well, we did but we didn't have enough vegies to justify all day cooking of what, three types of vegies.

Did any of that make sense?

• Vegie stock
• Water (or clear chicken soup from asian grocery, but you can survive with water I think)
• Onion
• Carrot
• Chicken or other form of animal flesh... I've heard baby kitten could be nice
• Tomato
• Snowpeas
• Thai chutney stuff.......
• salt/pepper/chilli/herb or seasoning of choice

ok...... vegie stock in a big pot. Get the tetra pack stuff... it worked well....

Rough cut some onions (I did it in 8ths) and slice some carrots and chuck them in..... Let this boil and bubble etc for a while.... you might not have the 2 hours like we did... but give it a good 30mins.

Add some water to the stock.... just to keep the level up. Add salt/pepper/chili to taste. You don't really need chilli at this stage though. I chucked some wostershire sauce in... because I like it [:

Dice some chicken (or meat of choice) up, quite small bits so they cook quickly and are only bite sized. rough cut the tomato and string the snowpeas.

Once the onions have cooked nicely (when they have broken up and gone
see-through) dump in the meat and give it about 5-10mins to cook. It
*will* cook quickly if you have made the bits small enough.

Once you are happy with the deadness of the animal flesh, chuck in the
tomatoes and snowpeas. Give them a couple of minutes and then chuck in the Thai mango chutney stuff..... we used the stuff that came in the mail to Droidy's parentals. Brand : Asia@home. Give it a bit more heat and stir it through...... give the soup a taste, it may need some more salt/pepper/seasoning of choice...... I only recommend freshly ground pepper because I hate the normal stuff [:

I think that is basically it....

I've cc'ed this to Droidy ...... she may have ideas of what I missed