Easy Pantry Thai Curry

An easy pantry curry from about.com's thaifood subsite, for when you don't have a good curry paste on hand..  The entire page is a nice fish curry recipe, but you can make just the curry sauce portion, to use as you like.

How easy?  How pantry?  Here's the ingredients I used tonight:

not pantry, but often in my house anyhow:
fresh cilantro
fresh basil
fresh ginger
garlic in cloves
green onions

pantry
can coconut milk
fish sauce
chili powder (yeah, like you make chili with)
ground cumin
brown sugar
turmeric
cayenne

I dropped without substitution:
ground coriander
shrimp paste

See Fish Curry Recipe for amounts and real directions

I'm pretty excited, because I don't have a brand of curry paste I'm excited about these days, it uses ingredients I'd stock for various dishes.  And this falls somewhere between curry paste and mortar/pestle in effort.

Why a curry sauce?  Over rice with a bell pepper, mushrooms, tomato, and potato it's a fabulous meal.  Add tofu if you like, or fish, or cashews or peanuts.

(pescatarian) Eel for Thanksgiving

My vegetarian daughter loves Thanksgiving, and has put down my vague guilty suggestions that I should make some main dish for her, alternate to the Turkey.  She loves the vegetable sides, and declares herself more than delighted just to have all those vegetarian versions of the carb ones (mushroom gravy, stuffing that baked in the oven with vegetable broth, mashed potatoes without broth, etc.)

This year, early in the November, I heard a radio spot about the eel industry, how it is mostly processed, cooked, and vaccum-wrapped in China, even if you buy it in a restaurant here.  And, I heard one of the inevitable "what our Pilgrim ancestors really ate," which mentioned the importance of eel.

Eel.  My daughter loves unagi, and now I'd learned that I wouldn't be expected to prepare it, just warm it up from frozen.  All it took was a quick trip to my local Ranch 99 Asian market to get the prepared frozen eel.   It became the "dare" food on the Thanksgiving table, and lots of people, including the kids gave it a try.

They've been vegetarian longer than me

A few months ago I discovered an email list of Vegetarian Mormons.  It's not high traffic, but friendly with lots of ideas.  For example, right now there's some emails being exchanged on vegan food storage.  I wasn't on the list a week when I learned that Protein Combining (eating a vegetable with a whole grain, frex, at each meal to get a "complete protein") is unnecessary.  Which everyone else figured out in 1988.

MormonVeg is a discussion forum for Mormons (members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) who wish to understand the reasons to reduce the consumption of meat and other animal products or get help in doing so. Participants do NOT have to be vegetarian, vegan, or even LDS to subscribe or participate actively. A genuine interest is all that's necessary.  (emphasis mine)

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MormonVeg/
I won't be reposting any of their emails here or elsewhere, of course.  That would not be cool.

Food Pairing from Belgium

Harvest is but a memory in the slough of winter, but what goes with zucchini? I would have said tomatoes, mushrooms, bell peppers and/or cheese. Also soy sauce--I had a friend who used to marinade long slices of zucchini in soy sauce, but frankly I would say the marinade never penetrated; she was kidding herself.

Now an outfit called "Sense for Taste" out of Belgium has an online food pairing calculator. Just the thing when I'm looking at the end-of-the-week ingredients that somehow didn't make it into any dinners. I'm intrigued but sometimes skeptical of the food pairing suggestions for zucchini, a food which can be a bountiful summer challenge.

http://www.foodpairing.be/FoodPairable.aspx?f=Zucchini

We'll be skipping the tea and Chardonnay, I add, wiping my hands on my apron.

Whether or not this internet toy leads you to your next culinary invention, or causes your frozen food conglomerate to hire them, Food Pairing is fun to play with. There is a long list of set foods, by category, on the right-hand column (you may have to click an arrow triangle to see them). The search box doesn't work for me and my machine--I don't know if that's because their coding is broken or because an ASPX database only interacts with Microsoft products.

Zucchini with ginger? maybe. Zucchini with apricot? Two Utah-ish ingredients I'd never have thought to combine.

Heather cooking vegetarian from scratch

I was just visiting commenter's blogs and wanted to point you to two vegetarian recipes that Heather of What's for Dinner recently posted on her site.

Kid-pleasing Chili Mac

Lynette's Vegetarian Chili that can be made in a crock-pot. I keep saying I'm going to wean myself off canned Hormel's Chili vegetarian.

Dressed up Salmon Cakes over Field Greens

If your idea of vegetarian includes fish, click here for a great recipe. Stay tuned for tomorrow. I'm trying a summer Chilean Bean Stew with a Jicama-Orange Salad and Maple Cornbread.