Rick Stein's Stir-Fried Green Chicken Curry

This cook book is to be my inspiration for this month. I stumbled upon Rick Stein's TV show on the ABC one night and was so impressed I immediately jumped on the internet and purchased this cook book.

My Asian "adventure" started yesterday when I went and bought a selection of ingredients for my first 2 dishes. Fresh herbs (coriander and Thai basil), ginger, galangal (a member of the ginger family), shallots, red and green chillies and lemon grass. Note that shallots refer to a small brown vegetable that resembles an onion with garlic like cloves. They are sweeter and not as strong as an onion and are often used in Asian cooking (not to be confused with spring onions which we also commonly call shallots). My senses were going into overdrive before I even started cooking!

The first step was to make a green curry paste using lemon grass, galangal, green chillies, kaffir lime leaves, black peppercorns, garlic, shallots and shrimp paste. Shrimp paste is another common ingredient in Asian cooking. It is made from fermented ground shrimp which are sun dried and then cut into blocks. It sounds and smells terrible but adds great flavour.

Lemon Grass Tip: you only use the pale lower section of the lemon grass stem in this recipe but keep the hard green stalks and freeze to have on hand to infuse custard.

The difference between this dish and a regular green curry as we tend to know it is that the chicken is stir-fried and the curry paste is more concentrated. This dish also has much less coconut milk or cream making it healthier than the usual green curry. The chicken is simply cooked in the green curry paste with a small amount of coconut milk, kaffir lime leaves, fish sauce, palm sugar (sugar extracted from the sap of palm trees, widely used in Asian cooking), red chillies, aubergines (I used Lebanese aubergines or eggplant), lime juice and Thai basil. Like most Thai food the resulting dish had a good balance of salty, sweet, sour and spicy flavours. There was a nice amount of chilli and the flavours from the fresh green curry paste made all the difference. Served with jasmine rice this dish was a hit!

Rating 8 out of 10.