Curry Paste

We love making Thai food, and we just happened to grow a green Thai chili plant this summer, which produced prolifically, so we decided to try making some curry paste from scratch with the chili peppers. We generally followed the green curry recipe from AsiaRecipe.com, except that we didn't have quite enough chili peppers. It turned out very well, and was quite easy, so I think we will probably do it more often, as we can find the necessary ingredients easily at markets in town, and making the paste is a great experience, smelling all of the things that go into it as you make it - not to mention while you're cooking it.

We ended up having leftovers of the ginger and lemongrass, so we decided to kind of improvise a yellow curry paste as well based on a number of other recipes, so while the images and instructions are for the green curry paste, the yellow follows the same basic procedure, and just uses the ingredients listed under yellow curry paste.

Green Curry Paste

Ingredients

• 1 cup of prik ki nu (green birdseye chilis) (we had slightly less)
• 5 tablespoons lemon grass, finely sliced
• 10 tablespoons of shallots, chopped
• 10 tablespoons of garlic, minced
• 5 tablespoons of galangal (kha) grated (we used regular ginger)
• 5 tablespoons of coriander/cilantro root, chopped (we couldn't get root, so used leaves)
• 2 tablespoons of coriander seed
• 1 tablespoon of cumin seed
• 1 tablespoon of freshly ground black pepper
• 2 tablespoons of shredded bai makroot (lime leaves)
• 4 tablespoons of kapi (fermented shrimp paste)
• 1 tablespoon of palm sugar (we used brown sugar)

Directions

The great thing about making curry paste is that the directions are very simple. 

Basically you just want to smash all of the ingredients together into a paste. This can best be achieved with either a mortar and pestle, or a food processor. 

Essentially, just put as many of the ingredients in at a time as you can, and blend/smash them up. Scoop it out and add more if you need to, and then mix it all together well at the end. Put in jars, and refrigerate or freeze for future use.

Yellow Curry Paste

Ingredients

• 12 cloves garlic, minced
• 11-12 spicy dried red chilis, with seeds
• 6 small shallots
• 1 1/2 tbsp coriander seed
• 1 tbsp turmeric
• 1/2 tbsp black peppercorns
• 1/2 tbsp cumin
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 3 cloves
• 1 tbsp fermented shrimp paste
• 1/2 tbsp fish sauce
• 1/2 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 tbsp fresh grated ginger
• 1 small stalk of lemongrass, chopped finely
• 1 tbsp brown sugar
• 1/2 to 1 tsp peanut oil

Potato Mushroom Scramble

We love making breakfast on the weekends, to go along with all that delicious coffee. Since we get farm-fresh eggs with our fresh milk each week, we usually have a good supply on hand, and this last weekend we also had an extra potato and some mushrooms sitting around that needed to be used up, so we decided to make a quick scramble. It turned out really well, so we thought we would share it with you all here.

For two people, scramble up 6 eggs, and add just a splash of milk.

Dice the potato, and coarsely chop the mushrooms and one clove of garlic.

Heat up some pork fat in a skillet over medium heat. We had some rendered fat from a pork roast that we used, but you could also use bacon fat.

Saute the potatoes until they are soft and browned, then remove them to a plate or bowl.

Add some more pork fat, and saute the mushrooms until they release their liquid and then soften up, then add them to the potatoes.

Rinse out the pan, dry it, and then melt some butter.

Throw all the potatoes and mushrooms back into the pan, and then pour the eggs over them.

Stir the eggs around with a wooden spoon as they cook, and scrape them off the bottom of the pan so they don't burn. Once they are done, scoop them out onto plates, and eat right away. Enjoy!

Espresso

We have a number of posts cued up to post in the near future, but continuing on the theme of coffee, we also are fortunate enough to be able to make espresso at home as well as coffee in the Chemex pot.

We were browsing through one of our favorite junk shops here in Portland once, and we happened upon this La Pavoni hand-pull machine. We knew that these machines are in the $700 range new from the store, and they had it marked as $75. We took it up to the counter to ask about it, as we also noticed that it had the power cord snipped. He said it had been a display model in a store, and when they got rid of it, they just snipped the cord and tossed it, so they had acquired a barely used machine for free, and all that was needed was to splice a new cord onto it, and it would work just fine. He did splice a cord onto us, and confirmed that it heated up, and we took the plunge and bought it for $75. It turns out that it works just wonderfully, and we now have a professional quality espresso machine at home.

Combine that with some brilliant coffee roasters here in Portland, and you can make some pretty nice coffee at home.

We can get crema and everything.

Steam some milk with the steam wand, and you've got a brilliant little macchiato.