Creamy Thai Curried Cauliflower Soup

I only ate two meals today, thanks to a lunch (rather than breakfast) time decision that I would bail on my detox.

Traditionally on Whole30 you are supposed to have three meals a day, and only three. Apparently it is thought that our Paleolithic ancestors didn't really snack. Kind of makes sense I guess. They probably didn't even eat three meals a day. Due to my eggy breaky making me a bit icky, I decided to go without the protein tonight, just to give my tummy a bit more time to deal with the change from no food to food.  It's still struggling a bit. Nevertheless, it enjoyed it's dinner.

Creamy Thai Curried Cauliflower Soup

Ingredients:

1/2 a head of cauliflower, broken into florets

1 small (or half a palm sized piece of a large) golden sweet potato, chopped

1 medium onion, diced

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

Approx. 4 tablespoons of Thai curry paste of choice (I use panang because it's quite mild)

1 tablespoon of coconut oil

2-3 cups of water

1 tin of coconut milk

A splash (maybe a tablespoon?) of fish sauce, optional

Juice of half a lime

Coriander (aka. cilantro) to serve

Heat oil in a saucepan over medium-high heat and sauté onion, garlic and curry paste until fragrant. Add cauliflower, sweet potato and water to the pan and return to the boil with the lid on (the water doesn't need to cover the veges, they will steam with a lid on the saucepan). It might be preferable here to add only part of the water, as too much will make your soup runny and a bit tasteless.  You can add more later if your soup is too thick.

Boil, stirring occasionally, until your veges are soft.  Remove from heat, add the coconut milk, lime juice and fish sauce and blend until smooth.  I use a Bamix stick blender straight in the saucepan.

Have a taste and add seasoning if necessary. Salt or maybe a bit more fish sauce if it's not tasty enough (it's amazing the flavour a bit of extra salt adds). Traditionally Thai curries have some kind of sugar to add the sweet component to their famous salty/sweet/sour flavour. The small amount of sweet potato in this recipe serves this purpose nicely.

Serve with a bunch of fresh chopped coriander sprinkled on top. (I like A LOT of coriander..)

This soup is thick enough to serve as a curry sauce so tomorrow, when my tummy is a little bit stronger, I'm going to add some chicken, mushrooms and maybe some capsicum, and have a chicken curry lunch!  Will upload pics so you can drool ;)

NB: if you're sticking to paleo guidelines, make sure you check your curry paste ingredients to make sure they are all paleo friendly. I use Valcom, nothing in there that I can't pronounce ;)

Jas xx