Jan 27 2010
Cheatin’
It’s true, sometimes we do cheat. Eat, you know, ready meals. Somehow filled pasta doesn’t feel too much like cheating but supermarket curry certainly does. But someone pointed out to me that really it’s not so different to buying a takeaway. So I don’t feel so bad.
Anyway, over Christmas, D and I picked up one of those ‘Meal for Two’ deals at a supermarket- two tubs of thai curry (one ‘thai green’, the other ‘thai red’- quality stuff, natch), two spring rolls and some sticky rice. Which constitutes way too much food for us, so we planked one of the curries in the freezer to come back to. The thai green was pretty good, spring rolls fine, sticky rice a disappointment as it acquired all these nasty spikey hard bits when warmed by baking.
The other night I pulled the other curry (thai red- are you keeping up?) out for dinner. As it was such cheating I decided I ought to do nice sides to cheer things up, and prove I still know how to work the cooker. I found a recipe for Thai Broccoli Salad online. This was not good. I should’ve twigged from the sheer quantity of peanut butter in the recipe but I’d been thrown by measuring the broccoli in cups (which I tried to do but perhaps I got it wrong and this was my downfall)(’Mercan readers- how do you measure something with such poor packing algorithms by volume?). I’ve not linked to the recipe because I would hate anyone to think I was endorsing it. Sweet and sticky to all the wrong degrees. It is unusual for this girl to leave broccoli on her plate but there was no question of finishing it.
Apologies but there’s not much I can do to make curry photogenic without pulling out props!
The rice worked out much better. A chance meeting with the lovely Ferdia on the train the other night (not so chance-we cross paths maybe once a week and end up sitting together once a month) put me on to the idea of cooking rice in coconut milk. I googled about a bit to work out logistics. Some people say you need to do all sorts of precise measuring and part boil/part bake/stir-stir-stir shenanigans. Other people seemed to imply that you just substitute water for rice and go!
I can tell you that if you cook rice by the 1xrice2xboilingwater-bring to boil-20mins180ºC technique that I was brought up on then it works absolutely fine to use 1 cup water and 1 cup coconut milk. The rice looks a bit weird when it comes out of the oven but it was still perfectly cooked. And so, so moreish. We didn’t quite finish it all at the time and the following day I was fantasising about it at uni.
So I expect that I’ll be doing that again. Although maybe not so soon. A couple of days later healthy diets came up at uni; on the Healthier Scotland website there were tips about improving takeaways and on the Thai page it said ’switch coconut rice for plain steamed rice’….booo.
