Bringing inspiration and ideas to better manage your home kitchen
Birthdays, and every other milestone or accomplishment, are meant to be celebrated! Other than the occasional batch of cookies or throwing together an apple or blackberry crisp for dessert, we don’t make a ton of desserts throughout the year. Sugar is probably one of the …
Salads can make a great meal. Especially when it starts to get warm out, or if you’ve had a lot of heavy meals or just been eating without a lot of fresh ingredients in your diet. They often hit the spot. I try to target …
Curry is something that I never really got into until later in life. It always seemed so vague and broad of a topic. Regional curries, colors of curries, powdered curries, curry pastes … where do you even start? Aside from that, I hadn’t really eaten much curry. And yet, as I’d search recipes from some of my favorite recipe sources, they were cooking curries. This recipe is not a legitimate curry recipe – it relies on a store-bought paste. But it’s a good intro into curries if you need one.
After having made a few different Thai red curry recipes, I have made a significant variation. It’s probably one of personal preference. All the recipes have you prepare the dish in a similar fashion – essentially combine all the ingredients together in one pot (veggies, chicken, curry, and coconut milk) and let it stew until cooked through. It’s an ok approach, but I find that two things result. One, the curry sauce becomes very thin and diluted from the moisture in the vegetables and chicken. And two, the vegetables end up being steamed. Nothing wrong with steamed vegetables, but they lose some of their texture and flavor when steamed. If you can sauté each individually and get some browning, it results in more texture and more flavor. And if you can cook the sauce separately, you can manage the consistency and flavor. So that’s my variation – separate cooking. Give it a try, experiment on your own, and make it better!
First, you'll want to prep and cook all the vegetables individually and set aside. For cooking, you just want to cook them to the desired doneness and get some color on them.
Next, prepare all of your ingredients. This will help you pull the curry together efficiently. Once you start, it's hard to set it aside while you're looking for some of the items.
Start your rice in a rice cooker. Next, heat 2 TBSP olive oil over medium to medium high heat in a large sauce pan. Add red curry paste, garlic, and ginger and cook about 2 minutes until it dries out a bit. Next, add the chicken broth and stir to combine. Simmer until liquid reduces a bit. You can then add the raw chicken to this sauce to cook it. Once the chicken is cooked through, add coconut milk, lime leaves, sugar, and fish sauce. Stir to combine. This is optional, but you can add a 2:1 ratio corn starch slurry to tighten up the curry (2 parts corn starch to 1 part water).
Once the rice is done, you can plate the bowls with rice, veggies, chicken and curry. Top with garnishes of choice.
Inspired by: Recipe Tin Eats
I’m always on the lookout for recipes that call for humble ingredients and use them really well. Coq au vin, translated “chicken in wine,” is a traditional French dish. I’ve only made coq au vin twice – once a white wine recipe and the second …
Week 2 of this 4-week series brings me to a recipe that I can say is actually mine. I made it up with inspiration from a couple of different food experiences, but I’ve not seen this recipe on the internet anywhere, with the exception of …
One of my husband’s hobbies, skills, and crafts is bread making. As I’m typing this, my laptop “stand” is a stack of 4 bread making books detailing the process in different ways. I will have him on here to share his sourdough breadmaking and bagel making tips and recipes because he has nailed both. Although, in his mind, he hasn’t. Which brings us to this post. Another one of his goals this year is to make it better. Play with the variables – including flour – to improve the outcome.
We discovered a grain grower and flour mill in our very own Skagit Valley. Many respected bread makers use their flours and we thought this a perfect opportunity to stock up on one of their popular bread flours. The timing of our trip coincided with the tulip festival so we planned to leave early and hit a few of our favorite spots in the big city along the way. We made some coffee, grabbed some egg bites and hit the road. Our first stop was Bakery Nouveau, a wonderful French bakery with all the delicious classic croissant items available. I snagged a traditional plain croissant and a Kouign Amann. Mike snagged a chocolate chip cookie and a twice baked chocolate croissant. We continued down the road. It was a beautiful sunny Saturday morning and early enough that there weren’t many people out and about yet, except those at the Costco car wash. Our next stop was Uwajimaya in Seattle where we loaded up on some curry, special sauces, and noodles. Really just making use of the trip into Seattle to grab things we’d normally have to get elsewhere.
We drove up to the Skagit Valley – it was a beautiful day. We arrived at Cairnspring Flour Mill and picked up our two 50-lb bags of flour. We stocked up because it’s a long trip to pick up flour, and you actually go through a lot of flour when you’re making all of your own bread. And since the pandemic, I like having a stash at home.
Cairnspring Flour Mill is a small operation, providing quality flours that are both milled and grown locally. You can check them out at https://cairnspring.com/.
All of us have recipes that we find and make over and over again. They’re classic staples for our menus. Recipes that we can return to and be just as pleased with as the first time we made it. In this 4-week series, I’ll be …
It’s the beginning of the month! How do you budget for the month ahead? This post will focus on budgeting tools. It’s a little ironic. If you think of your favorite financial gurus or even financial sites, you’ll be hard pressed to find personal budgeting …
My parents live across the cascade mountains from us. It’s a couple hours drive to them beginning in the lush green forests west of the mountains, cresting the cascades to the arid and open landscapes of central Washington. I’ve made this trip over the cascades hundreds of times and each time there’s a feeling of levity that comes when my eye can scan wide open landscapes, the traffic diminishes, and the clouds give way to beams of sunshine. We love visiting them and we love the valley they live in. It’s full of recreation, friendly people, and the geography we are drawn to. At one of the local grocery stores there, we came across Mama Torrez’ coleslaw. It’s a pico de gallo style salsa made with cabbage instead of tomatoes. It’s delicious. It has all the flavors of pico de gallo against the sweetness and crispness of cabbage. Whenever we’d see this at the store, we’d get it. And then we started noticing that we were paying $5 for a small tub of what was basically cabbage and seasonings. Cabbage is one of the most humble of vegetables – it’s usually less than $1/lb. We figured we could easily make something close to this. Now it’s one of our go-to snacks. Whether we’re making tacos, enchiladas, or just need an appetizer or snack, we’ll often throw this together. To me, it’s like popcorn. Very easy to eat an entire bowl by yourself.
Chop the first five ingredients and place in a large bowl. You’ll want to chop these all small so that they’re not too complicated to load on a chip. To the chopped vegetables, add the next three ingredients and toss.
Inspired by:
Mama Torrez
At the beginning of the year, we sat down and wrote out our goals. They spanned topics covering food, work, marriage, spirituality, recreation, fitness/health, finances, and our home. Some are big and some are small, and some are stepping stones toward a larger vision that …