Coconut Vegetable Curry

This post will be kind of lame. I didn’t do a lot of cooking the last 4 days. I was supposed to share with you the pork roll sandwich picture, but we had an issue with the pork roll. We bought a roll from Wegmans , but the slices Anthony cut from the roll were so tiny! Question for the Jersey people reading this, was that always the case little bitty slices, because that's not what I remember?! We went back to Wegmans yesterday and the pre-sliced is much bigger than the roll slices. What’s up with that?! I did have Anthony fry me an egg and some pork roll for breakfast yesterday. I’m okay with the pieces being smaller for breakfast, but not on a sandwich. Three of those tiny slices barely filled the Kaiser roll we had it on.

Not sure who was watching the show America’s Next Great Restaurant, but sadly Spice Coast (an Indian fast casual idea) didn’t win. I was pulling for it, because I would eat there a lot! It was between Spice Coast (Indian flavors), Brooklyn Meatball Co (meatballs), and Soul Daddy (soul food). Spice Coast would have been the only place I could eat at more often. I have nothing against meatballs or soul food (I love both a bunch!), but that’s not the type of food I can eat often. Indian is! (In case anyone is wondering Soul Daddy won! Congrats to Jamawn Woods! ) So strangely enough I made a vegetable curry last night, the night that Spice Coast lost. I love Indian spices! I’ve even added curry to my tomato sauce before. Yum!

The actual name of the recipe is Indian Coconut Curried Vegetables. Please don’t judge me when I tell you that I had Anthony chop the vegetables. I’m slow and I just wanted to get the cooking over with and Anthony is so fast at chopping vegetables! Not to mention that cooking should be a family activity right?! So the veggies were prepped: carrot and zucchini sliced, cauliflower cut, green beans snapped (is that what you call that snapped? I did the snapping!), onion, garlic, and ginger chopped. I didn’t buy a chili pepper, because I already had chili paste. I put the onion, garlic, ginger, and chili paste in my little food processor and made it into a paste basically. Put this mixture in a skillet with some oil and added the spices:  coriander, cumin, curry, and turmeric and heat it for a couple of minutes. Then I added all the vegetables and the coconut milk. It says to use 1 cup of the coconut milk, but I added a whole can and added some more of the spices in case the milk diluted it. You cover this and let it cook for 20 minutes or until the vegetables are tender.

                                    (I just love the color of curry dishes!)

I made basmati rice and heated up some naan bread to go with the veggie curry.  Overall this meal was super simple to make! The hardest part is chopping the veggies. The result: ah not so great. It was actually quite bland. I don’t think this is due to me adding a little more coconut milk than asked for since I added more of the spices. I’m not sure what the problem with this recipe is. The only thing I can come up with is to add more salt than the ½ a teaspoon it says to add and maybe even more of the spices. Crazy to think with all those spices we still ended up with a pretty bland main dish. Anthony said it needs chicken, but I’m trying to have as many meatless meals as possible. Although I’m sure it would taste better with chicken in it! I’m actually willing to try it with chicken just to see if it will up the flavor.

Not sure what will be on the menu for this week. I didn’t plan ahead. I wanted my meals to be a surprise this week. I need some excitement in my life, so I’m living on the edge. Yes, for me not having a menu for the week is living on the edge. I’m sure some of you do this all the time, but I’m a planner!

Braised Chicken with Coconut Milk and Curry

Day 20-Something really is wrong with me, somebody should research me. Cooking and I are just not meshing. The basics are not even possible for me. I should just stick to easy recipes with few ingredients. Once I do those well for awhile, I should then move on to more complicated recipes. After last night I’ve completely lost all confidence in myself. If I felt it was okay to just give up and move on I would, but I don’t feel comfortable giving up. Being someone who gets bored easily I give up more often then not. The minute a task gets just a bit too hard and I can’t really grasp the concept, I quit.

Now this doesn’t apply to my entire life, just to hobbies that I’ve tried out. A perfect example is knitting. I knitted a few scarves and could never master finishing them off. Someone else always had to do it for me. Since it seemed impossible, I gave up on it. Last year I decided to start a walking/jogging/running program, it worked out for a couple of weeks, but then my knees started hurting and I couldn’t run for long, so I quit. When the going gets tough, I get out. It’s not that I don’t like to work at things, I really do. But if I believe I just can’t quite reach the skill level to really do something well, then what’s the point of continuing with it. Folks, my brain is starting to feel this way about cooking.

Last night started off badly. I left work and got caught behind an accident and didn’t get home until an hour later. (My drive is normally about 10-15 minutes.) So I was in a great mood once I got home. Then I was going to cook something completely different, until I realized that one of my ingredients had gone bad. So that was out. Switching my brain over to another recipe is not the easiest thing for me. I get so focused on what I was supposed to cook, that what I end up cooking suffers for it.

Finally I decided to make Braised Chicken with Coconut Milk and Curry and serve it with Spinach Rice. I found this recipe in Reader’s Digest and the picture of the chicken with the rice looked really appetizing. I had to do some digging to find the rice recipe since it wasn’t included in the magazine. The one good thing about this recipe is I discovered a new ingredient I’ve never used it before, Sofrito. The taste was good, kind of like a tomato sauce. So I’m assuming that if you want the flavors of onion, garlic, pepper and tomato in a Latin style dish you can add this. I bet it would be a good addition to ground beef for tacos. I could use it in place of the salsa I normally mix my beef with.

The chicken dish was actually fairly easy to make. It calls for a whole chicken broken down, but obviously I wasn’t going to do that, so I bought chicken thighs. Everything else went really well, I’m not going to bother boring you with the details of how to put it all together (use the link on to the right of this post to see the recipe). The chicken smells awesome while it’s cooking. It has my favorite ingredients of coconut milk and curry, which is one of the reasons I choose to make it. Although it reminds me a bit of an Indian dish, it’s labeled as a classic Latin dish. So while my chicken was becoming tender and filled with flavor I moved onto the rice.

This recipe was a tough one for me. There were parts of it that just didn’t make any sense to me. You start the dish by heating up a ¼ cup of canola oil in a pan. Then you add long grain white rice and salt and coat the rice in the oil. Once the rice looks opaque you: “add enough cold water to cover the rice by the width of 2 fingers (about 1-inch). Bring to a rapid boil, and boil-without stirring!-until the water level reaches the level of the rice. Stir the rice once and reduce the heat to low. Cover and cook 20 minutes.” This is where things went very wrong. I didn’t understand the 2 fingers equal an inch logic. So I poured in what I thought was an inch of water. Then I waited until the water looked like it had reached rice level, though I’m still not completely clear on what that means. Next I stirred it and threw the cover on. 20 minutes later, the rice wasn’t cooked at all! AT ALL!! I have no idea what really went wrong. All I know is that I wasted 4 cups of rice!! I made 4 cups in the hopes of bringing the leftovers to work. HA! I did manage to cook the spinach correctly so I still had that to work with. So Anthony suggested cooking up some instant rice and throwing the spinach in that with olive oil and butter. So I did and it worked out fine.

Final Product:

Just because this dinner was saved in the end, does not mean I am happy about it. I’m super annoyed about the rice. Did I not use enough water? Well, who would know with the crazy finger instructions?! Grrr Argh! The chicken was tasty. I would totally make it again, but forget about that rice. I would rather just cook up some basmati rice with this chicken dish. I would still add the spinach to the rice, because that was a nice addition. Anthony really liked this meal even with the instant rice and asked me why I don't make this more often. That's a good sign. Sorry there are not more pictures, but these two things kept me pretty busy and I couldn’t be bothered with the camera.

I’m supposed to be cooking again tonight, but I might retire the duties to Anthony. I feel so defeated. I need to work my way back into the cooking life slowly. Oh and here is a picture of the Black Bean Lasagna from the other night. It was not all the amazing and I think I'll just stick to the classic lasagna that I make well.

Curried Cauliflower Soup

Day 17-Yes, I did finally cook again. But first I would like to talk about our recent invite to a friend’s house for dinner. I had been admiring my friend’s pictures on Facebook of the food he has been cooking every night. The food always looks so much fancier then what I do and rightly so since it is. He uses goat cheese, shitake mushrooms and various ingredients like that. I obviously don’t. He also just throws things together, which I really wish I could do. So I mentioned that he should be writing a blog, since his food looks so much better then mine. Then I suggested that he cook for us, so I can actually try his food. This week he finally invited us over and I was not going to pass up the offer.

I won’t get the name of what he made for us exactly right, but it was along the lines of: Tri Tip Steak with Mashed Red Potatoes (there was some kind of cheese in them), Asparagus, and Shitake, Baby Bella Mushroom, Artichoke Crostini. The mushrooms and artichokes were on this bread from Wegman’s with garlic and other goodness in it. The whole meal was very good! This coming from the girl that only rarely eats beef. I don’t even know if I’ve ever had Tri Tip before. So maybe this is a beef I could actually like! The crostini was so good that I had at least 3 and these were not small. Our friend said that he is starting to write down the recipes for the meals that he makes if they are really good. He wants to open a restaurant some day and he will need to have the recipes available for that. I’ll never open a restaurant, but I sure won’t mind eating at his!

It was time for me to get cooking last night. I really wanted to try the recipe for Curried Cauliflower Soup that I had found on a blog. One, it sounds pretty healthy and two, it has curry in it and that means turmeric! (If you don’t know why I love turmeric so much please look at my post entitled “Curry Pork Sausage Couscous”) Things went pretty smoothly last night. The ingredients needing to be cut for this recipe are one apple (Golden Delicious), 1 head of cauliflower, 1 small onion, 1 clove of garlic. I wasn’t really sure how to chop the apple so I sliced it and then chopped the slices. The cauliflower took awhile since I’m not a fast chopper, but it was easy enough. No problems with the garlic and onion since I use those ingredients a lot, but I’m so tired of all the tears when I chop onions. It’s almost unbearable and then my eyes are stinging from my lotion and mascara dripping into them. Yuck.

The rest of the soup making was a breeze. That’s one of the reasons I love making soup, it’s usually fairly easy. First you heat up 2 tablespoon of olive oil, then you sauté the onions in the heated oil. Once they are soft, you add the apple, garlic, and 1 tablespoon of curry powder (this might be too much if you don’t like spicy foods, so cut that back some) and cook for 2 minutes. Then add the cauliflower and 4 cups of vegetable broth and bring that to a simmer. Once it’s simmering turn down the heat to medium-low and cover. Simmer for 20 minutes and then take it off the heat to cool for 20 minutes. Once it’s cool blend the soup in a food processor or blender and stir in 1 teaspoon of honey and 1 teaspoon of rice wine vinegar. Officially you are done after that, but I reheated the soup because Anthony wanted hot soup, not lukewarm soup.

Final Product:

My thoughts: Ah it was okay. It was nothing spectacular. Anthony said it was a boring soup. There was nothing that took it to the next level. I wouldn’t call it bland, since it was too spicy for both of us and we had to add some sour cream to it. Would I bother making it again? Probably not. Trust me I really wanted to love this since it’s healthy, but I would say there was only a mild like. I’m not sure what we could have done to this soup to make it better, but I’m not giving up on ways to add more turmeric to our diet!

Totals: 10 minutes prep, 30 minutes cooking time, 1 pot, 1 blender or food processer

Curry Pork Sausage Couscous

Day 16-Okay I will admit that this is a cheat day. We are leaving for vacation on Wednesday and I didn’t want to go shopping or make too much of a mess. So I elected to cook a recipe that I’ve cooked for dinner before. I have never used it for the blog though. That’s why I think it’s okay.

Reality tv update-Spoiler Alert: Top Chef Restaurant Wars was disappointing for me. I was really pulling for the blue team (Kenny, Kevin, Kelly, Amanda) and they lost. Not only did they lose, but Kenny was told to pack his knives and leave. I thought he was going to be there well until the end. I’m still rooting for Kevin or maybe one of the girls. I hope Angelo doesn’t win. He has just bothered me from the start. And what the heck is up with Alex, he needs to go pronto. The Next Food Network Star winner is Aarti. I can’t say I’m shocked. I liked Aarti from the beginning. Partly because she cooks Indian food and as we all know that’s one of my favorite things. I was actually sad that Tom didn’t win, because I really did like his pilot. His was the most entertaining, but I guess Food Network is Aarti’s destiny (I think she mentioned something like that last night).

Last night’s meal was Curry Pork Sausage Couscous, yup more curry! Love it! Last week I read a blog and they posted the health benefits of Turmeric, so I say eat as much as you can! It’s super for you! I always tweak this recipe a little. I used a box of Near East Mediterranean Curry Couscous instead of regular couscous. I love a lot of flavor! Instead of pork sausage I used some poultry sausage I had in the freezer. It really doesn’t matter what sausage or couscous your use, but if you want more flavor use the Mediterranean kind. I put the water on to boil for the couscous with some olive oil and the spice packet, then once the water boiled I stirred in the couscous. Then I covered it and took it off the heat.

Once the couscous is sitting, (although to be honest I started this part while the water was boiling) you put the rest of the ingredients (except parsley) in a skillet and cook them up. So that’s the sausage (I de-cased it and chopped it into pieces), onion, garlic, pistachios, curry powder (I added more then the recipe calls for), and salt. You cook all of that together until the sausage is no longer pink. Then you can either put the couscous in the skillet or dump the sausage mixture into the pan that you cooked the couscous in (that’s what I do). Put that over a medium heat until warm. Viola you are finished! Easy! It was also a good thing that Anthony actually wanted this for dinner, and was pleasantly surprised that I had made it.

By the way, I did try chopping the onion like I had learned and it once again didn’t work out. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. How hard can this be?!

Final Product:

My thoughts, it’s easy and yummy. Plus you get the health benefits of the curry, so eat up!

Totals: 5 minutes prep, 15 minutes cooking time, 1 pot, 1 skillet

Well folks it’s been real, but I am officially on vacation from my blog after this post. I will just be cooking hot dogs and beans tonight and a friend of ours is cooking for us Tuesday. Needless to say I will not be cooking Wednesday-Sunday and will back with a new post on Monday. Ciao!