Sunday Gravy with yeah right: A quick trip to Thailand. Yellow Curry and Thai Green Beans

Good morning everyone,

Happy Memorial day weekend.

Sports wise today we’ve got a promotion to the Premier League play in game and in the NBA we’ve got a game 7 where the winner gets the ignominious glory of getting their asses kicked by Golden State in the finals. If you’re a sports fan you could do a heck of a lot worse.

Got a damn solid Sunday Gravy menu for all y’all too.

Quick narrative time. While this may sound a bit odd considering how much I’ve expanded my culinary horizons when I was younger I was not the most adventurous eater out there. In fact I was a fucking moron who stuck with the same familiar cuisines and rarely ventured out of my comfort zone.

I wish I could slap the piss out of my younger self. I didn’t even try sushi until I was in my mid 40’s. You  stupid, stupid man.

Another cuisine I was very late to the game for was Thai food. Which we are experimenting with today.

Speaking of needing a fucking slap. All those years I missed out on the flat-out deliciousness of Thai food. Now? I could eat that shit every damn week. No fucking lie I fucking love it. The spicier the better too.

We’ve got a local joint here in Pedro that can stand tall with any LA Thai place. It’s called Sirinat and holy fucking shitbiscuits kids, it’s a goddamn winner.

They tend to run a little pricey or maybe that’s just me ordering 5 different dishes off the menu every time I order.

I regret nothing!

They make a fantastic pad see ew and all of their curries are banging. In fact that’s the very inspiration for our menu today.

The green beans will look very familiar and they should, having been featured here a couple of times before.

The curry will be a brand new main dish on Sunday Gravy though. I have made yellow curry several times in the past and it’s really simple to do as long as you use the best ingredients. That’s the key.

Use the real shit too don’t be buying the Trader Joes curry either, dammit. Use the authentic stuff.

This stuff!

As always these can be found online.

Let’s get this shit going already.

We’ve done the green beans before. Recipe and original post here.

[editor’s note: there’s a killer pork tenderloin recipe in there too]

Thai Style green beans!

You will need:

1 pound or so of fresh green beans.

1 tablespoon of minced shallot.

4-5 cloves of minced garlic.

1 tablespoon of minced ginger.

2 tablespoons of soy sauce

1/4 cup of chicken stock.

1/4 cup of chili sauce – use sambal olek if possible. No you aren’t allowed to substitute with sriracha.

1 teaspoon of crushed red pepper flake.

Salt to finish.

Start by preparing your green beans.

After a nice rinse, go ahead and trim up the ends.

Full disclosure: I bought these green beans and the curry fixings a couple of weeks ago but ran out of steam from exercise, walking, grocery store and cooking my weekly vegan soup the day I planned to cook everything and just didn’t feel like cooking dinner too.

It does happen!

So I froze these beans for when I was ready to cook them.

Don’t do that. These fuckers really, really need to be fresh. Freezing them totally fucked with their composition and this batch came out a little too soggy for my taste. Use fresh, it’s a huge difference.

Anyway.

Drop them in boiling water for 3-5 minutes then put them in an ice bath to stop the cooking.

Let the green beans rest at this point and we can get started on the curry.

Yellow Curry!

todays inspiration from 

1 tablespoon oil 

Half of one yellow onion – chopped

3-4 cloves of garlic – minced

1 pound boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into bite-sized pieces

1/3 cup yellow curry paste

2 Medium gold potatoes or 1 large russet potato, cut into bite-sized pieces

One 14-ounce can coconut cream – Note: Coconut CREAM not milk. Just trust me.

1/4 cup water

2 teaspoons fish sauce

1–2 tablespoons brown sugar (optional)

Rice for serving.

We begin the curry proceedings by sautéing the onion. Add in the oil to a good sized pot over medium heat. Sweat the onion down for 5-7 minutes.

While the onion is cooking cube up the chicken.

Been awhile since I’ve used boneless-skinless chicken breast. Between my vegetarian weekday meals and my simple preference of thighs and legs to chicken breast I just hadn’t had much occasion to buy any lately.

Tell you what, that shit used to be expensive and I bought over 3 pounds of it every damn week! Kind of nice saving a few weekly bucks too.

Let’s get a look at that curry paste.

Well that is indeed one horrible-ass photo. That’s the bag of curry paste next to its container. Sorry about it looking like a goddamn crime scene photo.

Here’s the Amazon link for the curry paste if you have an interest. It’s a dynamite curry paste.

Time to add the chicken and the curry paste to the onions.

Give everything a good stir to fully coat the chicken with the curry paste. It’s right about NOW when your sinuses will be hog-walloped by the curry paste.

Oh fucking MY that is delightful! You’re neighbors will be notified of your culinary intent as well. Sure as shit.

Cook for 3-5 minutes to remove the pink edges from the chicken.

Add in the minced garlic and cook for just a few seconds until you begin weeping tears of olfactory joy.

Mother FUCKER that smells amazing!

Potatoes go in next. Coat everything up well.

Time to add in the coconut cream and the water. Give everything a proper stir and lid this fucker up. Everything will cook on a low simmer for 30 minutes. Stir occasionally.

This will give us plenty enough time to cook the rice and finish cooking the green beans.

After about 15 minutes I started to notice that my yellow curry just wasn’t well, yellow enough. Huh?

[mental gears engage – recent memory recall disk pack enabled]

Wait a minute!

That’s fucking right!

Now if anybody can make food yellow it’s this here motherfucker!

Remember this?

SEE!

Yep, that’s our saffron halibut and rice from a few weeks back.

My secret trick? See those little threads in there? Yep, that’s the leftover saffron. That worked so goddamn well on the halibut that I felt sure it would assist us here also.

Now is the perfect time to start your rice. Simple plain rice is perfect but I did a little something-something special that I’ll show in a bit.

Next we get back to work on the beans.

Shallots, ginger and garlic. You can use these 3 ingredients as a springboard to about a hundred different Thai/Asian food dishes in this current minced state.

Now get the sauté pan ready. Add in the peanut oil and get this over a medium-high heat. We’re kind of “wokking” this bastard today.

Drain the iced-down beans and get them in the skillet along with the shallot.

Safety note! Make sure the beans are thoroughly drained and dried OK? Hot pan + hot oil + water = Bad!

Since we precooked the beans earlier these will only need 3-5 minutes or so at this stage.

Add the garlic and the ginger to the beans. Stir, stir, mix, mix.

Cook hot and fast for a couple of minutes. We finish the beans up with the addition of the soy sauce, the chicken stock and the chili paste.

One final last sprinkle of the red chilies flakes and final light sprinkling of salt and you are done!

Times up!

Flames off!

No more cooking!

Let’s take a quick look at our rice today. Simple prep but I used homemade chicken stock instead of water.

This gave the rice a nice depth and richness that you don’t get by using water alone. A seasoned rice would play well here also.

Curry looks ready. Last thing though is adding in the fish sauce and the brown sugar. The fish sauce just fucking works here.

While I do prefer my curry a tad bit thicker for the most part, this is just fine.

Let’s plate it up!

Grab a bowl since the curry is a little looser than we intended. Scoop in some rice, ladle some curry over the top. Be sure to get plenty of chicken and potato in there.

I used a plate for the green beans for a little contrast action with the serving dishes

That’s real nice. If I had a little more effort/energy or foresight, an egg roll or two would most definitely not have sucked here. Oh well. Next time.

Shall we get a look at the obligatory close-ups.

Curry?

Oh shit! That looks good doesn’t it? The curry has a low-level heat more of a background note but it’s the curry flavor that stands out. It’s deep, it’s rich, it’s creamy, it’s complex, it’s fucking delicious is what it is.

And those beans.

Oh hell yes. We got the crisp crunch and the heat from the chili paste and the pepper flake plus the rounded herbal notes of the garlic and ginger.

When these are served in tandem?

That is one goddamn delicious duo right there.

Most importantly this is not hard to make! At all. It’s simple prep totally belies the depth of flavors and textures. You can blow some damn minds with this stuff and it’s not terribly expensive to do either!

That’s a rock solid combination of factors right there!

There you go everyone.

A proper beauty of a meal that can be made quickly and will absolutely make you look like a fucking culinary magician!

Win win.

As always thanks for being here. I’ve really tried to just dial in to the “just stick to the recipe” thing and hopefully I can provide a distraction and escape for everyone in this stupid fucking world we live in.

Thanks for riding along.

Until next week…

PEACE!