OMG a Recipe: You Can't Hurry Curry

You can't hurry love, no you'll just have to wait... and you can't hurry curry, so keep your knickers on! I came to the realization when looking at curry paste labels, specifically red curry,  if you're a vegetarian it's really tough to enjoy this without the pesky fish sauce or ground up shrimp that's inevitably mixed into that swarm of ingredients. I'm sure there's vegetarian-friendly curry pastes out there, but what if you can't find it? What if that one bottle the grocery store stocks was just nabbed by that skinny jean-wearing hipster in your neighborhood that you swear you saw eating a hamburger just the other week? Fear not, because if you have a little extra time on your hands, you can make your own vegetarian-friendly red curry and never be thwarted by skinny jean hipsters again. 

Rejoice, Meatless Monday Fans! Veggies are our FRIENDS! - Photo by Wasabi Prime

In honor of Meatless Monday, I wanted to share my adventures in making curry paste. This is more of a Thai-style curry, not an Indian or even a Japanese style curry, which just shows how popular curry is around the world and how nebulous the meaning is behind "curry." I have a deep fondness for Thai food, I love the combination of sweet, savory and spicy. Even the dish that's swimming in marvelously pungent fish sauce still manages to have some brightness to it, thanks to coconut milk or some fresh Thai basil. It's such a complex cuisine that I enjoy exploring from a home-cook standpoint as much as going out and eating it.

I love Thai curries, especially the spicy ones with a heavy garlic/ginger/chili kick, and I love the ease that this intense flavor can be easily added to dishes with the help of a concentrated paste. I've bought different curry pastes and I love the convenience of it, but thinking about Meatless Monday, I looked at a lot of the jarred pastes and saw that there were still creatures of the sea used for flavoring. Fail. Granted, this is part of the complexity of flavor, that unctuous depth that a fermented fish sauce or shrimp paste can add to a dish, but I wanted to see if by removing this element, a curry could still be good and Meatless Monday-friendly.  And hey-yo, it was plenty tasty.

Homemade curry paste goodness with or without meat - Photos by Wasabi Prime

 I looked online for different red curry paste recipes and sort of pieced together the common ingredients, minus the fish sauce. It's a lot of the same items: ginger, garlic, cilantro, lemongrass or fresh citrus, and lots of chiles both dried and fresh. Once it's all finely ground together in a paste and allowed to sit for a bit for the flavors to come together, it's a great flavoring to add to other dishes beyond curry. I've used it to punch up stir frys or work into a ground meat marinade, like if you're doing Asian-style meatballs. A lot of the paste's flavor gets developed in the bottom of a hot wok, letting it fry in some oil, get a little smoked and toasted, and then adding in whatever vegetables you wish before cooling the whole pan down with a can of coconut milk. I've used this curry paste several times now, for both meat and meatless dishes, and it gives the tastebuds a satisfying Fight Club smackdown.

Get a good food processor, or have a lot of patience if you're doing this with a mortar and pestle. If you're Amish, maybe you'd use a mortar and pestle, but if you're Amish, you're likely not reading this blog post on the Devil's Technology Box. Don't fuss with a mortar and pestle, they're overrated. And if you think it would be all cool and foodie-like to own one, save your pennies for a good food processor and several spice grinders. I rarely use my mortar and pestle and still wonder why the hell I bought it. But getting a couple of inexpensive pepper mills isn't a bad idea -- I have one that's just full of Szechuan peppercorns, along with one for regular peppercorns. Having a spare spice mill is handy for recipes like this, if you want to use whole spices before adding everything into a food processor to fully buzz down. A food processor won't grind the spices completely, and for a paste, you should get everything as finely ground as possible. I would have buzzed this batch of red curry paste down even further, but the Mister was trying to watch TV and me running the food processor was really annoying.

Plan on making the curry paste a few days before you use it. This is where you can't hurry curry. If you're making the paste from scratch, the mixture of fresh and dried ingredients deserve some time to mingle and get to know one another before they get down their bad self in the bottom of a hot wok. Just plan on making extra paste, get a few jars' worth and keep a couple in the freezer for later use -- that's what I do. It'll taste better as everything soaks together in its flavor-mush, so let time be your BFF when  making curry paste. 

So many veggies, you won't miss the meat, I promise - Photo by Wasabi Prime

Vegetarian curries are easy to enjoy and you won't miss the meat, despite what that Red-Blooded American Wearing a Trucker Hat inside you says. The trick is choosing a variety of vegetables and not just one or two. For this one, I had squash, carrots, green beans, bell peppers and Swiss chard. I cooked them in the order of longest cooking time, so carrots first, then bell peppers and squash, the stems of the chard before the leaves, then the green beans towards the end, just so they would keep their color and crunch. I added cubes of tofu after the coconut milk was poured in. You wouldn't even call it vegetarian curry at that point, it was just curry. And it was delicious.

As a side note, I like adding ground turmeric to curries, just to get that strong golden color, especially since this red curry paste doesn't make the dish bright red. I personally don't notice the turmeric flavor, but I'll toast it a little in the wok with the curry paste and oil before adding the vegetables and the color just distributes with everything.

Colorful meal and tasty over quinoa in place of rice! - Photos by Wasabi Prime

So plan ahead -- make this paste at least a few days before you want to use it. Have the proper equipment to get everything as finely ground as possible and don't even think about doing all this with a mortar and pestle if you ever wish to see the outside world again. Once the paste is properly self-marinated, use as you would in any favorite curry recipe, with as many or few tablespoons as you like. And add more chili peppers if you want more heat, this recipe is more two-star than five-star.

Vegetarian Red Curry Paste  (makes several cups' worth - save extra in jars and freeze for later)

Ingredients:
1 bunch of fresh cilantro
1/2 cup chopped onion or shallot
1/4 cup garlic cloves 
1 tablespoon cumin
4 dried red chile de arbol, stems removed, or fresh thai bird chilis (can add more if you want it super-spicy)
1 1/2 tablespoons fresh ginger
2 tablespoons salt
4 tablespoons chopped lemongrass
1/2 teaspoon ground pepper
Zest and juice of 1 lime

If using whole spices, grind them down first to a fine powder. Take all the ingredients and place into a food processor to fully pulverize and combine. Make sure no one is trying to watch television, or read, or perform delicate neurosurgery in the next room because it may take a while for your food processor to get everything to a paste. It's fine if you keep it rustic, aka, chunky, just don't be surprised if you get a bite of chili pepper! Use final paste as you would in your favorite curry recipe.

UnRecipe: Getting My Crave On

I'm back! I'm back!! Two weeks off and time in the Aloha State and what do I return with....? Mainland comfort food post. OK, so what I'm really doing right this second is photo editing and writing like a maniac to whittle down all the sights, smells, tastes and experiences of my last Hawaii trip into something that actually makese sense. At least something that sounds better than: Went to Hawaii. It was awesome. The end. Not cutting the Dijon mustard, is it? So, please bear with the Prime and enjoy this moment of in-the-moment cooking, as I tackle specific food and flavor cravings.

Another instance where rice, does indeed, make it nice - Photo by Wasabi Prime

I will say this, my idea of curry is very different from Hawaiian or Japanese curry, which is quite similar as they're usually on the sweet side and more like a beef stew with less complex spices. Living in an area with access to tasty Indian food, I've developed an appreciation and craving for those spices. When I'm feeling a curry craving, I like throwing together all the odd mixes of fragrant spices together and letting the magic of coconut milk bring everything together. The last time I made curry, I was wanting something especially fragrant, so I made a batch of jasmine rice that steamed in water and coconut milk, and then tossed the steamed rice with fresh cilantro leaves. The curry was the usual mish-mash of spicy, slow-cooked goodness, but in this case, the rice actually was the main attraction, as the steaming in coconut milk really made for a rich and delicious addition to the dish.

Holy Frites, this was tasty - photo by Wasabi Prime

One of my favorite guilty pleasure dishes is getting the steak and blue cheese fries at The Elysian in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of downtown Seattle. It's that dish of  flavor/texture favorites: thick cheesy sauce, thick pieces of steak, piled over crispy French fries. God bless America, and don't schedule a cholesterol test that week. I had a really specific hankering for this dish one week, so I made an at-home version. I seared some flank steak and sliced it thin. From the pan drippings, I started a basic bechamel sauce, but thickened it with chunks of blue cheese. In the oven, I roasted a pan of diced sweet potatoes that were seasoned with salt, pepper and some cayenne for extra heat. While not true French fries, it still provided a nice crispy bed of starch to layer the steak and cheese sauce over it. Is this a healtheir version? Hell, no. But did it help still the voice sounding like Audrey II, begging, "Feed me, Seymour?" Yes, it did. And I didn't even need to throw Steve Martin as a sado-masochistic dentist into a man-eating plant to make it happen.

A new segment titled: Wait, Wait, I Can Fix It! - Photos by Wasabi Prime

One night I could not deny the Call of the Wild Chocolate Chip Cookie. What, you never heard of Jack London's more obscure tale of cookie baking in the wild Alaskan frontier? Jeeze... read a book now and then, why dontcha... Acts of literature-besmirching aside, I have been known to do late night cookie baking. It's always chocolate chip cookies as those are my favorite. Nothing fancy, just the standard Toll House recipe that's on the chocolate chip packaging and I always have the basics sitting around. On this particular occasion, the craving was there, but the Toll House brand was not. I had some generic chocolate chips in the pantry and followed their basic recipe to cookie PFAIL! I should have listened to the voice in my head that said, "there's too much brown sugar in that recipe." But I ignored it, along with the other comments that voice makes about worshipping Satan or eating lead paint chips. Apparently one out of every three insane inner-voice comments is, in fact, correct. The cookie batter for the first batch ran like soup. The cookies finished baking, but super-thin and they all stuck together looking more like chocolate chip Pangea. So along with this event being a chocolate chip cookie craving, this became a Wait, Wait, I Can Fix It! event. Which is to say, I took the remainder of the dough into a baking dish with a criss-cross of parchment paper lining the inside, and threw it all into the oven. They baked off fine as chocolate chip cookie bars, and cutting them into little squares, you'd never know what a hot mess they initially were.

Stay tuned, dilligent readers. If you read through all that crazy mess, I again promise to post about Hawaii very soon!! In the meantime, if you haven't already tracked down a favorite charity that's providing humanitarian aid to help Japan in the wake of one of the worst natural disasters of record, please consider going to the American Red Cross website and giving what you can. The money you save by cooking at home versus going out to eat could help some people in serious need of aid!

UnRecipe: Creamy Eggplant Curry and Tofu

The welcome change in weather has inspired the making of soups, stews, and in this case, curry. We're still on Vacation Countdown at Wasabi HQ, but that doesn't keep the kitchen from continuing to crank out home-cooked goodness. A recent trip to the Redmond Farmer's Market yielded some colorful items like brightly-colored peppers and adorable little purple and white eggplants. I was inspired by a recent visit to my favorite Thai restaurant, Chantanee, and decided to make a Creamy Eggplant and Tofu Curry.

The heat is ON for spicy eggplant curry - Photo by Wasabi Prime

I particularly enjoy the combination of Thai flavors; it's always a satisfying mix of sweetness, complex spices, some heat, and a little bitterness. I took the chopped peppers and eggplant, cooked them down, and mixed in a dollop of store-bought red curry paste with some fresh lemongrass stalks. A can of coconut milk was added, then tofu, chopped Thai basil, and fresh spinach at the end. Everything simmered for a bit, letting the flavors combine and melt down the vegetables before ladling it over some basmati rice. I often speak of our low-carb household, but for curries and stews, I can't just eat them on their own -- sometimes I need my rice, dammit. Don't get between an Asian girl and a bowl of rice. You won't win, so just forget it, Atkins.

Something else to note, if you have a local farmer's market, now is the perfect time to search out some really nice vegetables. We're seeing a lot of unique squash and those eggplants we found were so adorable, I almost didn't want to cook them. I say almost because while I gave them a pause for admiration of their cuteness, I still hacked them up and threw them into a searing hot wok. In the rock-paper-scissors politics of food, cuteness is beat by hunger. Tummy satisfaction agrees with this choice. *burp*

Cute vegetables preserved for posterity before being om nommed - photos by Wasabi Prime