Here are most of the ingredients we had at the beginning of the week.
Dinner on Friday is reserved for happy hour each week, so our goal was to make it from Sunday through Thursday. With Sunday and Monday covered in the last episode, we'll pick up with Tuesday's dinner. Massaman curry was up next on the menu and we have been making this dish for several years. If you've never made curry before, and you're hoping to have something like what is served at a Thai restaurant, the key is not curry powder. Curry powder is great in Indian food, and I like to add a pinch to my sloppy joes, but what you're really looking for is curry paste. You can buy curry paste for massaman, red, green, and sour red curry. And I'm sure there are others too!
This massaman curry paste is a fantastic, flavorful foundation to the dish. It is made of shallot, dried red chili, garlic, lemongrass, galangal (similar to ginger), cinnamon, cardamom, coriander, and cumin. After sauteeing some paste in vegetable oil for a few minutes, add coconut milk (have I mentioned that is one of my favorite things at the moment??), chicken, potato, onion, pad thai sauce, peanut butter, roasted peanut, brown sugar, and fish sauce.
I told Heather there would only be enough for me.
Just kidding!
Our version tends to come out a bit thicker and creamier than the ones you see if you search online for pictures. Ours is also a bit less "rustic" looking as some versions use quartered potatoes instead of cubed, and whole chicken drumsticks and other large cuts. We've only ever used chicken but I imagine it would also be delicious with beef.
Wednesday is my day to work late at the VA, so we wanted to have something fairly quick and simple. Perfect day for spring rolls! Definitely not a complicated thing to put together, and it gave us the perfect opportunity to polish off our tasty peanut sauce.
Heather got things started before I got home so I didn't get any pictures of the assembly process, but I'm sure you can imagine it. We use round spring roll wrappers from the asian grocery store. They just need to be soaked in warm water for 10-20 seconds to make them pliable. Then, add shredded carrot, lettuce, shrimp, ride noodles, and cilantro.
Nothing to it!
For our last Thai meal of the week we decided to try something entirely new. This box caught our eye at World Market and we thought we'd give it a try.
Seemed simple enough. Cook the noodles, add some chicken, onion, included coconut powder and curry paste, add vegetable, etc.
Unfortunately, the included sauce was very salty and way too fishy. We diluted it as much as possible, and tried to keep the sauce to a minimum when we dished up our portions.
Not yum...
And this concludes our taste of Thai! You can probably tell that our two favorite thai flavors to cook with are peanut and coconut. Obviously this isn't a representative look at thai food and I'm sure there are tons and tons of fantastic dishes that we don't know about, or haven't had the huevos to try yet.
Our plan is to go back to our "regular" menu for this week, and next week we're going to do 5 new dishes in a row! That should be a fun way to bring you something interesting to read about as many of the dishes will hopefully be new to you as well. Plus. we won't be stuck with a single ethnicity for a week. We hope you enjoyed reading about our adventures and are really looking forward to posting again in a couple weeks!
Until then, happy eating and happy living!
