We treated ourselves to a mortar and pestle in the vague belief that ownership of such item will immediately endow us with all sorts of culinary skills. And if intent was enough, we'd dine like kings but really, we did OK tonight.
Even though I didn't have all the ingredients I reckoned that having the fresh lemon grass; fish sauce; coconut milk; fresh ginger, garlic and chillies was enough to go towards a Thai Green Curry. But with my current pain levels my brain hasn't always been in gear and I missed buying the vital fresh lime and bought mainly red chillis rather than green for the Green curry.
I've never made such a thing from scratch before and boldly set to with pestle and mortar. There must be a knack to it which I have yet to work out and luckily our regular blender did the trick that it even smelled like Thai Curry!
I tell you, it was so easy. Unbelievably delicious, fresh and made my mouth dance with the chillis. Pity I also neglected to get Thai rice so we had heavy duty brown rice and with the recipe being a conglomeration of a number of Thai Curry recipes and what ingredients we actually had it was a surprising success. The colour was a bit sludgy with the greens blended in with the reds of the chillis but never mind. It's a dish I'd like to experiment with a bit more and well worth trying.
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We had a microwaveable bag with cherry stones but of course I can't find it so am using my son's miniature hot water bottle and that works a treat. I'm usually a "cold compress" sort of person so going for warmth is strange for me. Thanks and hope you have a great weekend too :-)
WHERES THE RECIPE??????
Sounds yummy, but please share!
A friend keeps telling me it's easy to make from scratch, but I haven't tried. Perhaps I should.
As for mine.... deep breath for any Thai people or afficianados who cook this..... I blended:
2 sticks lemon grass
6 chillies deseeded
3 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon fresh ginger peeled
8 spring onions
1 tsp ground cumin
1 handful fresh coriander leaves
stalks from bunch of fresh basil
few teaspoons fish sauce
splash of sweet chili sauce
half cup lemon juice out of bottle (! - I had no limes nor fresh lemon!)
All these items were chopped first. Blitz in a blender for a few minutes (or pestle and mortar for more than 15 minutes... I gave up after about 7 minutes)
I then sank about 4 dried kaffir leaves into the mush to soak them a bit.
Put about tablespoon olive oil into hot wok and pour in all the curry paste and stir and bring up to heat.
Ours was a fish curry so I put in the raw chunks of white fish and carried on cooking until they were starting to cook. Add a tin of coconut milk and keep the heat up high.
At this point it is a worryingly thin soup but after about 15 minutes it reduces to a thick cream. Unfortuneately so does the fish so next time I won't add the fish until after the coconut milk has reduced quite a bit. At some point I threw in the handful of basil leaves which had been been roughly/barely torn.
Even at the thin soup stage I was pretty amazed with myself and thrilled as it tasted superb!
Serve with rice. Yum! Yum!
But don't use that recipe as I reckon I might have bastardised too many recipes to get that concoction but just goes to show that it was still OK even without vital ingredients or substituting with others.
I'd welcome a better recipe from anyone and will certainly try again!
Meanwhile, Cheryl has a great Fruit Cake recipe that is not to be missed!
http://www.uktvfood.co.uk/index.cfm?uktv=recipes.recipe&iID=512922
I just hope the link works. The recipe is delicious.
Cheryl - can you post one pls - I've never see a green curry before!
It is really bright green???
Anytime you want to come over and cook Doris, just let me know...*grin*
Minerva
Sending you hugs from (blistering hot) sunny Florida.