Recipes Discovered

Thai Curry Shrimp and Broccoli

I’ve been posting a lot of desserts lately, so here is something a little different. Red Curry Shrimp is something that I would typically order at a Thai restaurant. It’s one of my favorites, so I turned it into a simple stir fry. The sauce is only 4 ingredients – coconut milk, red curry paste, fish sauce, and brown sugar – but it’s a pretty intensely flavored. If you don’t like a lot of heat, cut back on the curry paste – it can be spicy! As with any stir fry, the shrimp and broccoli can be substituted out for anything you prefer. Seth and I really enjoyed this combination though. It was sweet and spicy, and made a wonderful dinner.

Summer Rolls Recipe

When Seth and I eat at a Vietnamese restaurant, we always get summer rolls. Summer rolls are similar to spring rolls, but they aren’t fried and are served at room temperature. Shrimp, vegetables, herbs, and rice vermicelli (a very thin Asian rice noodle) are wrapped inside an unfried rice wrapper. They are often served with fish sauce or peanut dipping sauce. I don’t really care for fried spring rolls, but there is something about the combination of the chewy rice wrapper and the filling of the summer rolls that I love.

I decided I would make 3 dipping sauces for the summer rolls. The first was the traditional chili fish sauce, which consists of fish sauce, lime juice, garlic, sugar, garlic chili sauce and water. I whisked the ingredients together until the sugar dissolved. The second sauce was peanut sauce, which is another traditional sauce served with summer rolls. >> Read more

Pad Thai Recipe

Where we used to live, there was an over abundance of Thai restaurants. At our current location, there is one Thai restaurant and it’s possibly the worst place I have ever eaten and I will not go back, no matter how much I crave Pad Thai. I tried finding a recipe so I could make it myself, but most of them require ingredients that I can’t find. After a lot of searching, I finally found a recipe at www.realsimple.com.

The recipe starts with dry rice noodles that are soaked in water for a half hour. The only package of rice noodles I found at my store though said to cook them in boiling water for 5 minutes, so that’s what I did and they turned out very good. I cubed the tofu and then drained it by placing it between a few layers of paper towels and putting a book on top. It only takes about 15 minutes to get a lot of the water out. After that, it’s a basic stir fry so make sure all of the ingredients are ready to go in the skillet. I mixed the fish sauce, vinegar, brown sugar and paprika together in a small dish and then sliced up the scallions and red pepper. >> Read more