Sour Curry with Vegetable Omelet (Kaeng Som Cha-om Khai Thot)
Kaeng som is a great vehicle in which home-grown vegetables are served. Ask people who come from traditional Central Thai households what vegetable represents the most prevalent kaeng som ingredient to them and, most of the time, they would refer to the fruits, leaves, and blossoms from the plants grown within the fences of their home.
InGredients
6 cups water
4 fish steaks (e.g. common snakehead, halibut), 50 grams each
1/4 cup sour curry paste
1/4 cup plus 1 Tbsp fish sauce
1 Tbsp plus 2 tsp palm sugar
1/2 cup plus 2 Tbsp tamarind juice
1 tsp sea salt
9 medium prawns, shelled and deveined
1 lime, cut into wedges
Method:
Bring a pot of water to a boil over medium heat. Add the fish steaks and cook till done. Remove from the pot. Keep the fish broth. With a spoon, scrape out the fish meat. Finely pound the fish meat together with the sour curry paste.
To make the vegetable omelet, clean the Cha-om, grip the bottom end with your fingers and slide to the top to collect the leaves and tips. Discard the stems. Put into a mixing bowl and crack in the eggs. Beat with a fork to mix. Heat the oil in a pan over medium heat. When hot, add the egg mixture to form a 1-cm-thick omelet. Fry until golden on both sides. Turn off the heat. Lift out and cut into bite-size pieces.
Add the curry paste into the fish broth pot, stir to mix. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Season with fish sauce, palm sugar, tamarind juice and salt. Adjust to your desired sour-salty-spicy combination. Wait for a while, then stir in the prawns, cook until done. Squeeze the lime juice over and turn off the heat.
Place the cut-up vegetable omelet in a serving bowl. Pour the sour curry over.
Note: Cha-om, or climbing wattle, is a species of acacia native to South-east Asia, including Thailand where it is popularly grown as a fence shrub. More importantly, its feathery shoots are eaten raw in salad and used as vegetable in curries as in the present recipe for Cha-om omelet. Other small leaf vegetables and shoots such as watercress, water spinach, asparagus, and broccoli shoot could be used as substitutes for Cha-om.