Chicken Soup Recipes

Some super Thai recipes – Chicken in the Straw.   by Dick Sandler

Our cook at the River Kwai Farm was a genius who had worked for various embassies in Bangkok. Using the fresh vegetables and the ducks and chickens we kept live on the farm, she invented some wonderful dishes. Stewed duck with red cabbage, shredded papaya fried in coconut batter, and our signature “chicken in the straw.” Jars of Col. Sandler’s hibiscus jam sold by the thousands.
Chicken in the straw. This is a traditional Thai Recipe making use of the rice straw that piles up after the rice harvest.
Ingredients:
Broiler chicken, better on the skinny side
Maggi sauce, pepper, and garlic marinade

Cooking:
Stake the broiler on a wood stake in the ground
Cover with a standard, square 20-litre kerosene tin
Leave open about 2″ at the bottom
Cover with rice straw, light it, and cook for 12 minutes

Fried shredded papaya. This is a recipe invented by Auntie Jeem, our cook, who almost convinced us when she said it was fried battered shrimp.

Ingredients:
1 semi-ripe papaya
Koki breading flour

Cooking:
Bread the papaya and deep-fry in cooking oil
This is one of the must have dishes in Thailand, I have this regularly while sitting on the tree house deck in Khao Sok enjoying my surroundings.

Hibiscus jam
This is made from a flower common in the tropics, known in some countries as rosella. It is a member of the hibiscus family with salmon-colored flowers. As the seed pod develops, a dark red fruit develops around the seed pod (calyx).

Ingredients:
1 kg fresh hibiscus fruit removed from the seed pod
1 kg white sugar
Shredded peel of 2 limes
___ water

Preparation:
Put the fruit in a blender for just a moment, chopping into small pieces
Cook in a heavy pan or pot (brass is best but not necessary
Remove from fire when still liquid as it will solidify when cool

About the Author

I have spent 40 years in Southeast Asia, mostly in the jungle. I developed eco-resorts in Thailand, starting with the River Kwai, then Khao Sok National Park, Krabi, and Phra Thong island, a beautiful and still pristine island north of over-developed Phuket (http://www.goldenbuddharesort.com ). In all of these, we raised the environmental awareness of both local people and tourists.
I still run a few Khao Sok tours that will get you closer to nature and give an experience you will never forget.
It works. At Phra Thong, we sponsored a 10-year turtle conservation project. Villagers told us they didn’t eat turtle meat anymore because their kids told them it was a bad thing! At Krabi, villagers stopped shooting the gibbons because they saw how much the tourists loved them.
I also had some great jobs as an eco-tourism consultant in other Asian countries. The best one found me going up the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea with four native bearers in a dugout canoe. The purpose was to advise them how to get some eco-tourism going in their incredible rainforest.
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