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Tonight I decided to try something different for dinner, so I wanted to replicate a dish I order at our local Thai restaurant, Kai Waan (sweet chicken). I got pretty close, but it is more of a curry than what it is in the restaurant; I’m still working on making it more authentic.

For those who don’t know, a curry is a spicy sauce-based dish usually served with a meat or tofu over a bed of rice. It is served mainly in Indian and Thai dishes, and is highly addictive. Thai dishes sometimes add coconut milk to add sweetness to the spiciness.

The type of curry I prepared doesn’t use the “curry powder” you see in the stores and is used in Western curry dishes, but contains a plethora of spices that really please the nose and make the mouth water.

I started with two different pastes: a shrimp paste and the actual curry paste.

The shrimp paste is pretty easy. Lori started with some fresh ginger root (a 2-inch “cube” to be exact) and finely chopped it up. Then she put that into the blender with a tablespoon of soy sauce, the juice from two freshly-squeezed oranges (about 1/4 cup), and a cup of shrimp (without the shells and tails of course). Then it was blended until it was a nice thick paste.

While Lori was doing that, I took 6 dried red chilies and crushed them up with my hands (be sure to wash your hands really well after doing that, because the oils from the chilies can STING!). I then placed the crushed red chilies into a bowl with a cup of water and let that sit for 30 minutes while I prepared the shrimp sauce.

After crushing the peppers I chopped another inch of ginger, two sticks of lemon grass, and about 4 ounces of shallots (see the picture of the chopped ingredients). I put that into the freshly washed blender (Lori had moved the shrimp paste into a bowl) and then I added in the chili peppers that had been soaking, the water included. After that I added 10 cloves of minced garlic, ground coriander, cumin, turmeric, and a tablespoon of the shrimp paste (deviating from the recipe slightly). I blended that all together to create a very rich and spicy smelling curry paste that has only a bazillion uses in Thai cooking. If you want the recipes for these pastes, I found them online. Here is the curry paste, and here is the shrimp paste.

With both the pastes prepared, I turned my attention to the chicken. I took a couple chicken breasts and thinly chopped them into strips. Then I stir-fried them until they were completely cooked. After that, I stirred in some vegetable oil and soy sauce over a medium heat, although I would have used soybean oil instead if I could have found any at our local market.

Next I added in a generous amount of peanuts (dry roasted but unsalted) and about a third of a cup of white cooking wine. Then I added 2/3 cup of the curry paste, stir frying the entire saucy mixture. By this time you can really smell the spices and it is awesome!

Then I said to myself, “Self? What can I do to kick it up another notch?” heh. Just kidding. I’ve been watching too much Emeril, I think. While I was adding all of this, Lori prepared for me in a saucepan a mixture of sugar, soy sauce, cooking wine, and a touch of vegetable oil. She let the sugar dissolve, and then we added it to the main mixture.

Now the mixture should be good and hot, and approaching a boiling state. Let it boil to let the alcohol in the cooking wine evaporate, and also to seal in the flavor of the curry and other ingredients into the meat. Next I added in some of my favorite sambal oelek and some more crushed red pepper to further spice things up. I like my food pretty darn hot. You can omit doing that, but I suggest you spice it to your own taste.

After a few minutes of intense heat, I lowered the heat and let some of the fluids cook off. You don’t want to let it do that for long because the juices are the best part in my opinion. So after a few brief minutes of simmering, the mixture is ready to serve! Serve it over a bed of steamed rice, and have plenty of liquids on hand if you spiced it up like I do. The dish turned out wonderfully, hence the lengthy blog entry.

You can freeze the left over curry and shrimp paste and use them in other dishes. I want to try my hands at making a Masaman curry next.

I’ve been sorely lacking in updates for a while. The main reason has been that work has been keeping me very busy. My new job is really fun but there is a lot of work to do because we’re all busting our humps to get a project out the doors by January 1st. We’re cutting it pretty close and it has people a little tense.

Another reason I’ve been neglecting my blog updates is because we’ve been without broadband for about a week and a half. Turns out our DSL provider accidentally knocked my info out of an ATM switch and assigned someone else to my port. It took a week of calling them and trying to get them to dispatch someone to tell me that, and the dispatched it guy said the phone techs should have been able to see that right away by looking at my account. Not one of the 5 people Lori and I both talked to sounded like they knew what they were doing. I finally got fed up with their bungling of our trouble ticket and decided to switch to Cox cable. We got our cable hooked up but the modem we used is dead, so we had to get a new one from Cox.

Finally I’m back online and with a spunkier connection than before. 4Mbps down and 512Kbps up whereas with DSL we had 768Kbps down and 256Kbps up. I’m a lot happier with this setup.

I’m also pretty exhausted. Car-Mart had their annual Christmas Party tonight, so I’m still recovering from the massive quantities of meat served at the Brazilian restaurant where it took place. Mmmm… Meat!