Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Curry Stew

I've been dreaming of curry since eggplant came into season. This last weekend I bought four at the farmer's market.
Several years ago I purchased a cookbook called "Greatest-Ever Thai Cookbook". There's at least one recipe on my Cooking List from this recipe book. Tonight, I used a recipe as a guide but made several tweaks. I'm only going to share my tweaked recipe.

Curry Stew

14 oz. eggplant (2 small ones), chunked
1 small zucchini, chunked
4 Tbsp oil (a low smoke oil, like vegetable oil, not olive oil)
about a dozen pickling onions, slice about half of them, the other half cut in half
1 tsp fennel seed
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 1/2 Tbsp ginger, chopped
2 c vegetable stock
2 lemon grass stalks, outer layers discarded, finely chopped
2/3 c cilantro, leaves and stems chopped separately
2 Tbsp red curry paste
2 sweet potatoes (or yams, if you can't find sweet potatoes and are really hungry for this stew), chunked
14 oz. coconut milk
1 Tbsp brown sugar
8 oz mushrooms, quartered

Lots of chopping involved in this recipe, and this only shows part of it.
In a large skillet, brown the eggplant and zucchini in about half the oil. Then place in a bowl off to the side.
Add the pickling onions that are cut in half and lightly brown. Then place in the bowl with the eggplant.
Add the rest of the oil to the skillet. Add the fennel, cloves, ginger and sliced onion and saute for about 5 minutes.
Add the stock, lemon grass, chopped cilantro stems and curry paste and simmer for about 5 minutes.
Add sweet potatoes and simmer for about 10 minutes or until potatoes are tender.
Add the onions, eggplant and zucchini back to the pan and simmer with 5 minutes.
Add the coconut milk, brown sugar and mushrooms and simmer another 5 minutes.
Add cilantro leaves right before turning off the heat.

Serve over rice. I ate it over brown rice that I soaked over night. Check out how much water the rice absorbed:
The black line about 1/3 of the way up the container is where the beans and rice were last night. I filled the containers about 3/4 the way with water.

You know that amazing smell when you walk into a Thai restaurant? That's the scent of ginger, fennel, lemon grass, stock and cilantro simmering.

Let's see if the Hubs notices this is a vegetarian recipe... 

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