Curry-ageous Cooking

Nurse A and I have been cooking a lot of meals at home recently, some delicious and some not-so-good. But regardless of their tastiness, the dinner conversation almost always starts like this:

Nurse A: "I would make this again, but ...."

 or

"I think we used too much of ..."

And then we ramble off a list of flavors the dish needs or reasons the dough didn't rise properly, etc. Well, the Thai curry we made Friday night--even though it called for fish sauce, which terrifies and fascinates me equal amounts--was not one of those recipes. It. was. so. good. Even groomsman Bob, connoisseur of fine curries, enjoyed it.

Thai red coconut curry over jasmine rice

I've wanted to make curry for a few weeks now, ever since I noticed our farmer's market carries three kinds of curry paste and giant bottles of exciting-yet-scary looking fish sauce. I thought this was really special until I realized Kroger carries all those items too, but the farmer's market stuff looks cooler. See?

That Squid brand fish sauce is for realz.

So after a bit of Googling, I chose this curry recipe because it seemed suitable for a beginner (not too many unfamiliar ingredients) and I just really wanted to use coconut milk. The original recipe is delicious (although I agree with the reviewer that the brown sugar isn't neccessary) but we made a few alterations to fit our personal tastes.

-We used double the coconut milk and curry sauce the recipe calls for (we were very hungry!)

-We left out the brown sugar and it was definitely sweet enough with the coconut milk.

-We added chicken to ours that we had sauteed in curry powder and a little coconut milk.

-Since we doubled a lot of flavors we used a 1/2 a teaspoon more fish sauce than the original recipe.

I don't know why I was so afraid! This was so good. We just added more curry paste and fish sauce slowly so we could taste and make sure we weren't overdoing it. We paired this deliciousness with warm homemade naan (recipe here) and served the curry over jasmine rice. I would definitely recommend this! Use less curry paste if you don't want it too spicy, and add the sugar if you'd like it sweeter. And yes, I did eventually realize I chose a Thai curry and an Indian flatbread--oops! They still went quite well together in my opinion.

Our naan looked like grilled chicken but was so quite good!

Now to figure out how to use fish sauce in other recipes since I have such a huge bottle!