Thai Green Curry

We cooked green curry almost every week for a while, but haven’t done so for some time and decided to end the green curry drought today. We had bought the ingredients when we were in Chinatown on Saturday, so this evening when I got home from work I started preparing the paste.

I managed to resist the urge to start bashing things in the mortar and pestle immediately and took my time to measure and chop all the ingredients beforehand so that they would be ready to bash when their turn came. As a result, they were all laid out on a couple of plates, so I took a picture. Next time I’ll try to get some of those little glass bowls and bottom-heavy shot glasses that seem so popular for ingredients on shows such as Saturday Kitchen.

The ingredients are, sort of from left to right, front to back: lemongrass, galangal, lime zest, shallots, coriander root, garlic, cumin, coriander seed, black pepper, salt, green chilli. These were all bashed into a paste of course, and then we started cooking the curry. Traditionally, these curries don’t contain much in the way of vegetables; maybe some small aubergines if you’re feeling adventurous, but we always put in loads of vegetables. Today we had baby corn (a staple of ours), sliced red and yellow peppers and purple sprouting broccoli.

The result had a lovely deep flavour with just enough chilli kick without completely setting our mouths on fire. Needed a dash of salt, but that was minor. Served with jasmine rice.