Monday, May 21, 2007

Curry Paste Face Off

Today was Staff Day at my university. In addition to attending a school breakfast and a university lunch, I left at 2:30 (I skipped out on bingo, volleyball, and other activities). This gave me plenty of time to go to Jay International Food to buy green curry paste and basil.

It also gave me time to think about curry paste and take pictures...



I'm amazed at the difference between Americanized Thai curry paste and the real deal. In my head, the green curry paste says to the red curry paste, "RRRAAAWWWRRRHHHH! Be prepared to be beaten! You stupid Thai Kitchen, much-too-expensive curry paste! I have 10 more ounces and am at least $3.00 cheaper!! RRRAAAWWWRRRHHHH!"

This is what I picked up the curry paste for:



Green chicken curry with green beans and basil. Super-yum! On the left is our latest experiment with Thai iced tea. We're close, but we still haven't nailed it.

For dessert, we had a piece of this:



It's the chocolate-orange-hazelnut poundcake from the Moosewood baking cookbook. Also very, very yum. Don't worry, we haven't eaten this much of it - I took half of it to work.

Last night I made spicy tofu burritos. No picture, but also tasty.

[Hey, why is Blogger Preview broken for Safari now?? Grrr! I wish I could write a QA note for it....but that was a different software company and a different time.]

Besides packing and more packing, Porkchop and I are going to see Knocking Thursday night at the history museum. [Thanks to cj for the alert!]

More random thoughts....

Our tomato and basil plants arrived from Burpee. This makes me happy and worried. I hope I don't destroy these little tomato plants. I'm not so worried about the basil because we were successful last summer.

I have another 7 am conference call in the morning. Terrific. On a related note, I placed calls to the Netherlands and Benin on Friday for the upcoming conference. I feel so international.

Porkchop cleaned the kitchen tonight. YAY!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Have you ever made homemade curry paste? It's super easy. I love Tyler Florence's green curry recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_23100,00.html

It's easy to make a big batch and freeze the leftover paste in ice cube trays for later use.

Carrie said...

I haven't made my own curry paste before, but Tyler Florence's recipe looks too good (and not hard at all) to pass up.

I just need to acquire a spice mill...

Anonymous said...

I went to Target and bought the cheapest blade coffee grinder they had in stock two years ago. It's still serving me well as a spice grinder. $14 very well spent.