Veg Thai Red Curry with Brown Rice

Yet another Thai recipe! Well, its no news that I love Thai food, right? :) So does the husband, so it’s a hit in our house anytime I make it, in any format.

I am aware of the fact that the husband likes Thai food only because it looks very much like the South Indian food, especially the Thai Red curry, which is why I make quite some stuff with Thai Red Curry paste as the base. Check out my Thai Red Curry Poha recipe here.

Thai curry flavored Poha

Yeah, I know how it sounds. Thai curry and Poha in the same sentence. :)
But it is a great combination, indeed. Veg Thai curry paste is nothing but a great mix of ginger, garlic, coriander, cumin and onions and of course, some specific Thai herbs like basil and Kafir lime leaves. Essentially, its like your regular South Indian sambar powder ;-)



So when I had some Thai curry paste left over in the fridge, and I had to eat a healthy , yet quick meal, I resorted to this quick meal, something I made in less than 15 min, since I had the curry paste ready in the fridge.

Khao Soi, Thai style

The last time I tried something in this style , I had decided to make the Burmese version too... I had loved the method of eating curry with noodles so much that I now intend to make noodles this way only. :)

Veg Chop suey with Noodles

The other day, they served Veg chop suey noodles at snacks after a big fancy meeting at work. That was my first time tasting these… yeah, needless to say, am not a fan of Chinese food, and rarely even try them. But these noodles were served in a different fashion – noodles topped with curry and vegetables, and it wasn’t even tasty. All of the different elements in the dish were bland but the cook in me saw potential in the dish. My interest was piqued and I HAD to try this dish!

And hence the attempt to recreate my own version of Veg Chop Suey noodles…

Risotto, with Thai Green curry flavours!

Risotto, like Indian rice is versatile, I’ve gathered. You can make it in a lot of flavours with a variety of vegetables, not to mention the meat options. One idea that I got from GoodFood [May, 2012] magazine is to cook Risotto with Asian flavours, and I was like – why didn’t I think of this before!

This is perfect for families like mine, where one member wants to eat only Indian flavours, and another wants to experiment with the meal. It took me a while before I could actually try this , but when I did try, I knew I had a winning recipe at my hand!

Panang Curry flavoured Fried Rice

Am not a huge fan of Chinese food, especially the ones that have Ajinomoto in them and because of my allergic reactions to soya sauce. And so, Fried rice was never a favourite. But this evening as I was wondering on what to eat (cooking for one is a chore, and if I have to drag myself into the kitchen I might as well make the experience interesting), I thought of Fried rice. But not the plain old fried rice, something with a flavour in it. And that is how this dish was born.

I used Panang curry paste while sautéing the vegetables and then followed the regular method of making fried rice. The result was a slightly sticky, because of the curry paste, but very flavourful fried rice, which in my opinion would’ve been great without Soya as well.

Thai weekend, may be?

Turns out its not really a alone weekend for me then.
The husband has decided to make guest appearances amidst all his travels, and I have plans lined up with friends. But then, when isn’t that the case! :) (I know… even at times when I feel that I need some time for myself, I cannot but think how lucky I am to be blessed with so  many friends, that I can never be lonely. Alone yes, lonely, never! :) )

Since guest appearances have to be honoured with something special always, and since this particular guest also has all meals of his day this weekend planned out, I did not want to overwhelm his stomach with anything heavy. Not making anything wasn’t an option, coz I still had to eat. And cooking for one is not really fun if you have to do it 5 times in the same week. So I decided to go with something light on the stomach.

Now, Hyderabad is not as chilly as I would’ve liked it to be, but people say its quite cold. The first time this season I felt the chill was when I was having dinner with a friend in a roof-top restaurant. She said she was cold, and I said it was quite pleasant. (Oh well… I am someone who has stayed out in the night at 10 PM in Seattle with nothing on me except a thin T-shirt and linen shorts , on what was the coldest night that week. I didn’t even have cash or a mobile phone at hand, but that’s another story. And yes, I lived to tell the tale.)

And every blog I go to talks about making pumpkin soup to beat the chill… and yes, I got piqued. Pumpkin is something I have not worked with before. I have never tasted a pumpkin, and I do not even know how to say if it is ripe enough or not. But this morning at the vegetable market, I saw Shal, my friend buy a slice of pumpkin. I asked her what she did with it, and she went on to give me options on what all you can do with it. And that’s how I got thinking. I asked the vendor to cut me a slice of ripe pumpkin and got home thinking about what to make with it, and what herbs would go well with this. Oh yes, I have been thinking about what should get into this soup since morning, and by evening I had a pretty good idea. I know, I know… the processor is kinda slow that way :).

It had to be something spicy, something with stuff I had at home and had to adhere to the weekend rule. The rule that says -

Thou shalt not spend more than 30 mins in the kitchen on a weekend.

So I grabbed the stuff I had in the fridge, and in my kitchen garden (yeah, I am a big show-off that way :-P ) and got to work.
Since just a soup isn’t enough to feed two people for dinner, I also decided to make some salad. And since the garden largely supports the Thai theme, that was what it had to be.

The guest who also happens to be my alpha, beta and only tester , testified that he loved both the soup and the salad. The spices were just-enough and he loved the blend and taste of pumpkin. So then, pumpkin is here to stay in the household afterall.

Thai Pumpkin Soup

Ingredients
Pumpkins – diced and cubed – 2 cups
Onion – small sized, sliced – enough to fit in 1/2 cup
Garlic cloves – diced – 6
Turmeric – a pinch
Cumin seeds – 1 tbsp
Red chilli – 1
Olive Oil – 1 tbsp

Thai Basil leaves – 10-12 – shredded
Lemon Grass – 1 stalk
Diced Coconut – 1/4 cup (or coconut milk)
Coriander seeds – 1 tbsp
Onion – small sized, sliced – enough to fit in 1/4 cup
Red chilli - 1
Salt – to taste

Instructions

Microwave the pumpkins at full power for 2 mins, so that they are slightly cooked and do not take a long time to cook on the stove.
Heat oil in a pan, and sauté the onions, garlic, cumin and red chilli in it. Add the microwaved pumpkin pieces to this , sprinkle turmeric and cook for about 5 mins, or till the pumpkin is roasted/cooked. Once cooked, remove this from heat and let it cool.

In a blender, mix the onion slices, coconut, coriander, another red chilli and the roasted/cooked pumpkin till it becomes into a pulp. You might have some coconut pieces even after the pulp is all done, let them be as is.

Heat this on the stove in the pan again. Knot the lemon grass stalk and put it in the pulp mixture. Add half the basil leaves to this and salt to taste and bring this pulp to a boil. You can add water to dilute it and suit your consistency.

Garnish with the remaining basil leaves, and serve hot. This recipe make 2 big cups of pumpkin soup.

Cucumber salad (with Thai dressing)

Ingredients
Cucumber – peeled, cut into 1 inch long sized pieces – 1

For the dressing
Juice of half a lemon
Soya sauce - 1/2 tsp
Roasted peanuts – crushed – 1/4 cup
Red chilli flakes – 1/2 tsp

For the Garnish
Green pepper & Oregano – enough to sprinkle on the salad
Coriander (Cilantro ) leaves – Just a handful

Instructions

Mix all the ingredients for the dressing and pour it on the cucumber pieces. Toss and garnish. Serve cold.

Pad Thai noodles. Well, almost. :)

So here’s the deal with me. Turns out, I don’t just like cooking for myself, I HATE it. But then, paapi pet ka sawal hain. And I must make something to fill this stomach, and especially after the evening walk, with the stomach rumbling in spite of all the fruits I had, I needed to eat something super fast, and it had to be interesting so that I don’t ditch it midway. So I really had to think long and hard this evening.
Quite sometime back, when I had freshly discovered cooking Thai food at home, I bought myself a pack of rice vermicelli Thai noodles. Along with many other groceries that I buy , this one was put in the pantry, and was hence promptly forgotten. Only last week when the maid was cleaning up the pantry, did we discover a whole load of items that I bought, all in good intentions to be cooked and eaten. But then, they followed the Life Cycle of Groceries in my kitchen!
Its like this – I see something interesting in the aisles in the mall, I buy it immediately, and resolve to make something delicious with it the same evening, or at the max, the next. So this item sits on the kitchen platform, waiting to be cooked. Weekdays are typically busy weeks, and considering the husband’s dislike for anything that is not Andhra food, this does not get cooked during a weekday. I then plan to cook it over a weekend, and like all other weekends, either we end up eating some place out, or I am too tired to make something and so end up eating rice-dal (always the husband’s suggestion!). So after a week of sitting on the kitchen platform, its location is changed to the pantry unit, which is where it will sit till it is rediscovered by chance.
Basically - in my kitchen, matter does not change its form or shape or even state. It just changes its location ;-)

I have been thinking I should make something with those noodles all weekend, and this evening seemed to be the right time. I quickly searched for some noodle recipe. Yeah yeah, I know its simple and all,but given the non-noodle-y (literally also ;-)) person that I am, this being my first time ever, and I needed some guidance from those awesome people sitting in my computer.
Pad Thai seemed interesting, but the procedure to make it seemed a little complicated for my at-the-verge-of-fainting-due-to-exhaustion-brain. Moreover, the dutiful wife that I am (Ha ha ha!) I was waiting for the husband to get to home before I do some decent vegetable shopping. The veggie compartment in the fridge just revealed bell peppers. That’s all! And the meal had to be healthy and veggie too, right? Phew! I just picked up the recipe for the Pad Thai sauce, read the instructions on the packet of the noodles on how to cook them, and got started.
Ingredients1/2 Onion – Chopped vertically
1/4 of a bell pepper – Red, yellow and Green – Chopped vertically
Handful of peanuts, De-skinned
8-10 cloves of garlic – crushed. (I use a traditional mortar and pestle for this.)
1 tbsp sunflower oil
100 gms Thai rice vermicelli noodles (or any Thai noodles)
Salt – To taste
Chopped Coriander leaves – For garnish

For the Pad Thai sauce 1 tbsp tamarind paste
1 tsp red chilli powder
4 tbsps hot water
1/2 tbsp soya sauce
1 1/2 tbsp sugar


ProcedureCook the noodles per the instructions given on its packet. Mine said I should soak the noodles in normal water for 5 minutes and drain it.

Mix all the ingredients for sauce, and keep it aside.

In a wok, heat the oil. Add the onion, crushed garlic and let it cook till the onions get soft, and pinkish. Now add the bell peppers, and let them all fry on a medium flame for 5 mins.

Add half the amount of the sauce to the wok now, and let the vegetables simmer in this sauce. Cook till the sauce gets absorbed into the vegetables, for about 5 mins on a medium flame. Add required amount of salt.
Now add the noodles to the wok and toss the contents. Add the remaining sauce (you can reduce the quantity if you are not greatly into tamarind) to this, and cook on a medium flame, till the consistency of the noodles is dry, the noodles look cooked, and the sauce is absorbed.

Note:

1. The quantities ingredients given here are to suit just one person, for dinner. You can easily increase the quantities
2. The instructions are suited to make almost-Pad-Thai noodles because the recipe I read over the internet for Pad Thai did not have peanuts, and I cannot imagine anything Thai without peanuts.
3. Bell Peppers are what I used. You can use any vegetables. Carrots, beans, sprouts, Chinese cabbage, cabbage. Anything.
4. If you are not as much into garlic as I am (I always double up the number of garlic cloves in any recipe!), feel free to cut it down. But trust me, it wouldn’t be as tasty without garlic
5. If you feel that your noodles could do with a little more tanginess, you can drizzle lemon juice on them before digging in. :)

Thai Yellow Curry

 

Its a funny story on when I tasted my first ever Thai khana. Well, it was not when I was travelling in Bangkok, though I could’ve had the authentic best there. The fear of everything being mixed with oyster sauce scared the vegetarian-me so much , that all the days that we were in Thailand, we went looking for an Indian restaurant, and ate Alu Paratha – all 3 times a day, for almost a week. Yes, shame on us.

And after I came back, I bumped into blog posts stating how awesome Thai food is and how tasty the street food there is. Well, that was when I felt a real heartburn ! :) A very valuable lesson learnt from the foolishness displayed in the Land of Smiles was that, no matter how it is, we have decided to try the local cuisine. Or atleast not search maniacally for Indian restaurants.

So when we saw that Hydie had its first own Thai restaurant, Isda Thai, we dined there almost immediately. The ambience was awesome, so was the food. What I loved the best is that they had veggie options for every dish on the menu. It felt like paradise. Thats where I ate my first ever red, yellow and green curries. And fell in love with the spices used in them. Since then, it had been a dream to make Thai food!

When I saw this recipe by Arundati, I tried it right away. Yellow Curry with white rice – Made a pretty picture on the plate.

Followed most of the steps in the recipe to the T, but made some minor changes to it, because of lack of ingredients, and reluctance to use some :)

1. I did not use the oyster mushroom sauce. I know its vegetarian, but blame it on the word ‘oyster’!
2. Didn’t find baby bok chok anywhere, and so omitted that. Could’ve substituted that with spinach as advised by Arundati and Nandita, but didnt have that too handy.
3. Had just cauliflowers, red & yellow peppers and one small zucchini.

As I was making the yellow paste ready, I could not help notice the uncanny resemblances between a Mangalorean dish called ''Kodyelu’ and this paste. They have the same basic ingredients(cumin, coconut milk and coriander) , and Yellow curry paste has a few more exotic ones.

What I made might not be an exact Thai Yellow curry, but we loved the spice in this, and the taste overall. And it totally appealed to the husband who loves anything that can be eaten with white rice!