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Recipe Thu Sep 20 2007
Thai Red Curry with Grilled Summer Veggies
I love Thai curries. But sometimes I find the curry-infused veggies in them somewhat disappointing--whatever vegetables you use, they all taste like curry, because the flavor of the curry is so strong (though tasty). The other day, I wanted to cook some Thai red curry with (some of the last batch of) the summer veggies I had at hand, and decided to tweak the usual recipe to address that "all the veggies taste alike" problem. After all, it's mid-September and we're soon saying goodbye to the beautiful summer veggie season.
Instead of cooking the veggies (grape tomatoes, an orange pepper and a bitter melon--an eggplant I thought I had turned out to be quite dead), I grilled them in the little toaster oven. While the veggies cooked, I fried some ginger in palm oil in a heavy skillet, then browned some chicken thigh. When the chicken was browned on the outside, I set it aside and fried the red curry paste, added coconut milk. Then I put back the chicken in the skillet and let the curry simmer for a while. It was smelling already pretty good at this point.
In the toaster oven set at around 500 degrees, the tomatoes started to burst pretty soon, so I rescued them first and dumped in the curry skillet (which had been turned all the way to the lowest setting to keep it warm without losing all the liquid), . After several more minutes, the skin on the pepper started to brown and bubble up, which then I transferred to the skillet. The bitter melon took a while to cook, probably about 15 minutes. When, finally, the bitter melons were nice and brown, I put them in the skillet and turned up the heat to quickly warm up everything.
Although the photograph came out rather unappetizing (which is why it's not here), the curry turned out very nice to the palate. Each vegetable still retained its own flavor and stood up against the punchy curry, which worked more like a sauce than a soup. Although the veggies didn't contribute to the flavor of the curry, the chicken did, and given the already complex aromas and flavors of the curry mix, this was more than enough. The other advantage of this method was that I could control the cooking time for each veggie pretty easily, thus giving each one the best texture. This might just become my standard way of doing Thai red curry.
