Random Vegetable Curry

Does that sound like kind of an apathetic title? Because this is kind of an apathetic recipe. Luckily it was delicious.

Ingredients

• 1/2 eggplant, chopped
• 1/2 sweet potato, chopped
• 1 large zucchini
• 1 1/4 blocks baked tofu, chopped
• 1 tin chickpeas
• 1 tin nuoc cot dua (coconut cream or coconut milk)
• 1 T. red Thai curry paste
• 1 T. brown sugar
• 1-2 T. soy sauce
• 1 handful spinach
  

Methodology

1. Put veg in pot with a little oil. Add coconut milk and let it simmer.

2. Add curry paste and brown sugar. After a while, add in the tofu and the chickpeas. Cover and let everything boil until the sweet potato is tender.

3. Add the soy sauce (to taste). Throw in a handful of spinach at the end and let it wilt.

4. That's it.

Notes

*This came out well. Good with toasted pita.

*About 250 calories if serving 6, if 8 about 192.

*Needs more curry paste.

Thai-style Ichiro's Rice

Who was Ichiro? My hypotheses aside, the rice dish that bears his name is an excellent way to use up leftover rice. And since I wanted curry, I changed it up a little bit.

Ingredients

• 6 oz. tofu, marinated and cooked
• 1 baby bok choy
• 1 sweet potato
• 1/2 summer squash
• 2 dried crimini mushrooms
• 2 cloves of garlic
• a trickle of oil
• 1 tin coconut milk (I used "lowfat organic", but I recommend the one that says "nuoc cot dua" or "coconut cream" for maximum goodness)
• 4 tsp. red Thai curry paste
• about 1 T. brown sugar
• about 1 T. of the marinade from the tofu (see above)
• leftover brown rice, about 3/4 c. (or however much you have)
• a sprinkling of ginger and cumin
  

Methodology

1. Heat garlic and mushrooms in a deep pan with oil (maybe a tablespoon or two, not much). When they sizzle, add the curry paste and the coconut milk. Heat until it boils, then add the veggies. Cover, stirring occasionally.

2. When the sweet potato is cooked, add in the brown sugar, the rice, and a bit of the marinade. You may also want to add some salt. Cut the "steaks" of tofu into bite-sized pieces and add those, too.

3. When everything is warm, taste and add a sprinkling of ginger and cumin. You may want to add more sugar or salt as well. It's done! Enjoy!

Notes

*I recommend serving with Sri Racha sauce and sweet chili sauce on top. If you use the lowfat coconut milk, this has very few calories. Actually, it probably doesn't have that many even if you use coconut cream. So go all out.

*0/7. This was delicious, and an excellent way to use some vegetables.

Mango Sticky Rice

Cleaning out the files. Here's a recipe from 22 March 2007.

Called Khao Niaow Ma Muang in Thai, this could be seen as a variant of rice pudding. Regardless, it makes a nice warm dessert with fruit, which means it's healthy and you don't have to feel bad about eating it. =] Hurrah.

Stuff you need:

• 1-2 mangos, ripe
• 1-2 cups rice. You're going to want "sticky rice", which is more glutinous; risotto rice would work, also possibly sushi rice. You should look around.
• 1-2 Tbs brown sugar
• 1 tin coconut milk (actually you want "coconut cream" but it's about the same)
• 1 cup water
• spices, including salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamom

Procedure:

1. Peel the mangos, or if you have a fucking imperialist vegetable peeler that doesn't work for left handed people, make your roommate do it. Cut the mangos off the pits, then slice them into smallish bits.

2. Measure rice into pot. Add water and coconut milk in a 1:.5 ratio, so 1 cup of rice would get 1/2 cup water and 1/2 cup coconut milk, 2 cups would get 1 and 1, and so on. Turn it on over low.

3. Add in cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, salt, brown sugar to taste. Keep stirring so it doesn't burn. When it starts to bubble and thicken, add the mangos.

4. Keep cooking, stirring a lot. This will cook up very quickly, so be careful; also, be ready to add more coconut milk/water as needed if it starts running out of liquid.

5. Eat! Yum.


Notes:

Possible variations: You could add...sliced roasted almonds, raisins, pineapple instead of mango, papaya instead of mango, possibly cantaloupe melon instead of mango, grass jelly (uh, I don't know how to explain what this is. It's...green?)...Bananas might also be nice.

I'd recommend that you use powdered cardamom instead of the whole type if this is possible. Whole cardamom is really nice in theory, but in practice I always wind up biting down on the pods, which is gross. Also, you could add chili powder if you were into it - I think that would be good, and surprising.

Hmm, now I'm thinking of a dessert with cocoa powder and chillies...

Sweet Potato and Thai Eggplant Curry

I am a clever enough monkey to recognize that baking when I'm bored + everyone out of town for the hols is not a good combination, so I restrained myself and made curry instead.

I know, right?

Ingredients

4 Thai eggplants
about 2 sweet potatoes
1 block firm (Chinese) tofu (about 8 oz)
red curry paste
1 tin coconut cream*
salt/pepper/etc.
oil and garlic

Methodology

1. Chop veg and tofu into appealing-sized pieces. Heat oil and garlic in wok.

2. Add tofu to pan. Toss a little to coat in oil, then let it sit. This is apparently the key to browning the damn stuff; this guy B. showed me the technique the other day. I have been cooking tofu for years and my, let's call it "short attention span" has apparently been working against me. Who knew?

3. Add coconut cream and curry paste (to taste, at least a couple of tablespoons). As it begins to boil, dump in the veg.

4. Cover it and let it cook, stirring occasionally, until the sweet potatoes are cooked. Depending on the curry paste you may need to add salt, pepper, and a tablespoon or so of (brown) sugar.

5. Serve over rice.

Notes

I had this great green curry with Thai eggplants, snake beans, and basil in Laos and I've been trying to recreate it. Making it with a) red curry and b) sweet potatoes isn't exactly the way to do that, but it was good nevertheless. Next time I will wait a bit before adding the eggplants (like when the sweet potatoes are about halfway done) because they got a bit mushy.

2/7 on the disaster index.

*It's called "nuoc cot dua" in Vietnamese. I was shopping at an Asian import store. But seriously, it's better than coconut milk I think. This is the stuff you need.

Thai-style Cabbage Noodles (annotated)

Another recipe from my days in Asia:

Thai-style Cabbage Noodles - a fusion cuisine experiment

Cabbage noodles are notable for being incredibly simple to make - basically you saute some cabbage, add it to noodles, salt and pepper it, and you're done. So what happens when we needlessly complicate the procedure by making instead a pad thai type dish with cabbage? Deliciousness.

[Cabbage noodles are a Hungarian recipe, for the record, and it has already been modified to be vegan (Hungarians traditionally put some sort of meat in it, I believe, but the friend I got it from was a vegan, so that's how I learned to make it. Also, I don't eat meat, so it's kind of a moot point. --E]

Stuff you need:
2 tomatoes
1 onion
3 cloves garlic
some mushrooms [I tended to use dried shitakes, since they are better than almost anything in the world. Straw mushrooms would also be good. --E]
a chili pepper or two [I have a heavy hand with the peppers. For the record. --E]
pad thai sauce or mushroom sauce or oyster sauce or hoysin sauce - mushroom/oyster is more authentic and harder to find/less vegetarian. I used pad thai sauce. [At the time I was looking for these things, I had spent the day trying to explain to a woman in a marketplace in Vietnamese that I wanted sauce from Thailand for noodles, which was of course confusing. These things can all be found at an Asian grocery in the US, and you don't have to speak Vietnamese/Chinese/Thai/whatever to get them. --E]
soy sauce mmmmm [At the time I wrote many of these recipes, I was living in a very warm climate, which means that I tended to put a lot of salt on my food, since I craved it like nothing else. You should be careful before you follow suit in more temperate climes. --E]
salt
about a quarter of a cabbage - more or less to taste [Either regular green or "napa" (白菜) will work. I believe I originally used a green cabbage. --E]
rice noodles [Medium to thin is best. --E]
1 cup of water

Methodology

1. Cut up the veggies, heat up some oil in a pan and drop in the garlic, the mushrooms, and the pepper. Let it saute until it smells delicious. Do not look away, they will burn. The Thai way of dealing with garlic is basically to smack it with the knife and then cut it up still in the wrapper and fry it also still in the wrapper, producing something a bit crunchier than normal. I kind of like it, and it saves the hassle of peeling garlic, but you can totally do it however you want.

2. Add in the onion and the cabbage. Cook them until the cabbage begins to wilt and take up less space. Add the tomatoes.

3. When everything is looking pretty good, or when you are tired of wrestling with the damn bottle of pad thai sauce (that stuff is worse than ketchup, to get it to come out) add about a tablespoon of pad thai sauce and about two tablespoons of soy sauce. Mix it in. Add salt if you want. You could also add brown sugar or chili paste if you had/wanted those things.

4. Add the rice noodles and dump in the water. It will bubble around for a while - keep it on medium-high heat and stir a lot. When you can cut the noodles with the edge of the spatula, it's done (alternatively, when they are not crunchy to taste). Add additional stuff (salt/chili/pepper/soy sauce/pad thai sauce/sugar) as you want. Serve.

Pad Thai

I am in a hurry, but here is Pad Thai for Daniel and Claire:

Ingrediants:
half a block of tofu
7 oz of rice noodles
oil
garlic
about 1/3 c. green onions, cut up into appetizing lengths
1/2 T. brown sugar
2 T. soy sauce
3 T. mushroom sauce (or veg stir fry sauce is what I think the bottle calls it. It's still mushroom sauce.)
1 egg, beaten
some bean sprouts
3 T. water

1. Put oil in pan and heat with garlic until it smells nice (you can use vegetable oil, canola oil, sesame oil, it doesn't much matter). Slice the tofu into small, thinnish slices and stirfry until it turns brown.
2. This is where you'd add meat if you were using meat. But I don't.
3. Mix in a bowl the water, soy sauce, sugar, and mushroom sauce. Set aside.
4. When the tofu is cooked, put in the egg and scramble it around.
5. Add the soy sauce-sugar mixture.
6. Put in the noodles. Add some water and cover until cooked. You may need to add more water, so keep it on hand.
7. When noodles are cooked, readjust the seasoning; I recommend adding more sugar, soy sauce, and probably some hot pepper too. You may also want salt.
8. Add bean sprouts and onions and turn off heat. Garnish with ground peanuts, chilli powder, brown sugar, more bean sprouts, and lime juice to taste.


Easy peasy, right? Serves about 4, roughly 250 calories/serving.

When readjusting for more people, remember to cut the tofu thin. Cooking the rice noodles seperately may be necessary.

I'm off to work.

(This morning when I tried to post this, blogger said, "Do you mean DELORT?" and ate it, but now I find it exists again in whole form. Weird.)