On Thursday for dinner I made one of me and Brandon's favorites, chicken curry. I had clipped a recipe out of the Oregonian years ago for chiang mai curry noodles and I keep making it, with slight adjustments every time. The recipe doesn't call for any vegetables, and I think every dinner needs to have them, so I usually add a red bell pepper to make it red curry, but I had already used the red bell pepper I had in our previous dinner, so I used the green one in this. I also thought I had added onions in the past, but when I was eating it that part seemed different too.
The recipe calls for you to saute garlic in oil and then add the curry paste until it's fragrant, then add the chicken until it starts to cook through. This is where I added the vegetables, a chopped jalapeno, then coconut milk, chicken broth, tumeric, curry powder, and soy sauce. Let that simmer for a while until things are cooked. The recipe calls for rice noodles, but I think that it's too soupy and hard to eat that way so we always have it with rice. Jasmine rice tastes the best with it, but we had white rice so that's what I used and it works just fine.
Now to the flavor; this time I thought it was more bland than before. I used two cans of coconut milk when last time I only used one and decided that definitely wasn't enough. But I guess using one low fat and one regular isn't good enough either. Coconut milk is only going to taste good if it's real coconut milk. Also, I tried just sprinkling in the spices and I was supposed to have a teaspoon each of tumeric and curry powder, and maybe I didn't get as much as I needed. The recipe called for 1 3/4 cups chicken broth and I just poured some in that I estimated to be about a cup. Maybe next time I should omit it all together so that we get the strong flavors we want instead of watering it down. It was still good, spicy enough and hot enough temperature wise to keep me content. But it wasn't the kind of curry I've had before that you don't want to stop eating because it's so good. So a recipe I've made half a dozen times I still am trying to get it to be great.
I have a great love for curry as well, and I think you're right, coconut milk is a must, but you only taste it it's the full version... I've always enjoyed the additional flavor of using chicken or veggie broth instead of water though, I have found that when yellow curry doesn't do it for me the red (actual red curry paste) is a very tasty alternative, it's more full/ rounded flavor... Cousin Heidi :)
ReplyDelete