Category Archives: food and cooking

Thai Stew with Sticky Rice Balls

November 19, 2015food and cookingcoconut, sticky rice, Thai foodGretchenJoanna

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When 10-15 years ago a friend mentioned that she was making Thai stir-fry for dinner, I was immediately very interested and asked her how she did that. It’s more of a stew, actually, she said, and gave me a list of the ingredients and how she puts it together. Since then I have experimented a lot with her basic recipe, but let’s start with those simple fundamentals. Here is what she wrote:

A Thai curry is not exactly a stir-fry, but more like a stew. For a good beef curry, I would cube some chuck or whatever, add a can of green chiles, a chopped onion, some chopped garlic, some chopped cilantro, 1/4 cup of fish sauce, a Tbsp or two of sugar, and a can of coconut milk.

Stew it all together about an hour. For a much hotter sauce, you can use a Tbsp. or two of canned red curry paste. But I can’t stand the heat. For chicken, I would do basically the same thing, but use canned green curry paste. For a mild paste, put the chiles, onion, garlic and cilantro in the blender with a bit of water, and add that to the coconut milk and chicken. Don’t forget the fish sauce…it’s the salt.

That was when bought my first fish sauce. Now I always enjoy looking at the many brands in the store I go to. This photo is of the one I have in my cupboard currently. It’s hard to imagine that the flavor varies much; in any case, it’s not something I want to sample by the teaspoon, or even quarter-teaspoon.

Over the years I worked out my own basic recipe for this stew, which I see departed from my friend’s in several ways:

Thai Stew

Put in a pot:

coconut milk – 1-3 cans
Thai curry paste – ½ to 2 T.
fish sauce – ¼ c.
1-2 onions, chopped
1-2 Tblsp. sugar
beef chuck in cubes

Cook for 2 hours, adding water as needed; then add whatever vegetables you like. My favorites are:

cauliflower
carrots
red bell pepper
cilantro

Cook until done. Adjust seasonings. Put some Sticky Rice in a bowl and ladle the stew on top.

These are flexible amounts where given. You can make this with chicken, pork, fish, shrimp or tofu. Adjust the cooking times accordingly. You can also use part vegetable, fish or meat stock in place of part of the coconut milk, and use part or all soy sauce in place of the fish sauce. But the Thai curry paste (not expensive if you can find it at a Southeast Asian store), fish sauce and coconut milk make the Thai flavor.

I will gl P1020801 interrupt the string of recipes to talk about the rice. I do have another post in which I discuss the rice component, but just today I showed my housemate Kit how I make it, and that generated some more pictures for me to share.

When this stew first became part of my repertoire, I probably served it over sweet brown rice, but eventually I learned how to make the Thai Sticky Rice that really finishes off the exotic meal. I like to form it into balls while it is still warm; some go into bowls with the stew, and some are to serve on the side, for dipping into a mild coconut sauce.

One time I had three different brands of coconut milk in my pantry and when I opened them I noticed how different they looked and tasted, so I wrote down my findings; the calories listed below are per can. This week I added to my information card when I discovered the last brand, and now I have two favorites. I found them both at the Thai store, and also at Food Maxx, a dollar more expensive. I know many people will only be able to find the Thai Kitchen brand in supermarkets, but if you can locate an ethnic market to shop at even once a year you can save a lot on all these ingredients.

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After I wrote down that very flexible recipe above, I had occasion to gl P1020797 create a fish stew for a crowd, on a Lenten “fish day.” I’ve done it three times now, and have this “new” recipe on its own card. I needed the stew to not be too spicy, so I switched to Yellow Curry Paste, the main ingredient of which is lemongrass instead of chiles. I like to get these pastes at the Southeast Asian store, where they cost only about $2 each.

Thai Fish Stew

Put in a soup pot and begin cooking:
2 cans coconut milk
4 cups water
4 teaspoons vegetable stock base
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 teaspoons yellow curry paste
4 medium cloves garlic, minced
2 teaspoons salt
1 chopped onion

After this mixture has simmered for a while, add vegetables:
1 bunch of cilantro, chopped
1-2 bunches of green onions, sliced
1 large carrot

And whatever other vegetables you may like, however much you like. I have used bok choy, snow peas, sweet potato, butternut squash, mushrooms, sweet red pepper….

When the vegetables are just tender, add:
1-2 pounds of fish, in chunks
1/4 cup fresh lime juice
And simmer until the fish is opaque, just a couple of minutes. Serve over sticky rice.

This is the version of stew that I made yesterday to take to the family with a new baby and sickness in the house. It seemed to me that they might like something different from the usual chicken or lasagna. I made eight quarts, enough to keep half at home. This was the first time I used bok choy; I loved the yams in there, and noticed that the cilantro stems I hadn’t had time to remove had disappeared on their own. When the vegetables were almost done I took out half for us and put that in the fridge, and added pork to their pot.

Tonight I heated up our portion and added fish, and made another batch of rice. We made it all into balls, and ladled the stew over three of the rice balls in each bowl. The rice in the bowls quickly gets soft, but you can enjoy a still-chewy rice ball on the side dipped in a sauce.

Here is one version; you can experiment and make your own, varying the amounts and seasonings. This sauce can also be spiced up, all or in part, by the addition of extra curry paste. If your stew is mild but some people enjoy more heat, they can add spicy sauce to individual bowls.

Thai Coconut Sauce

1/2 cup coconut milk
1/2 teaspoon yellow (or other) curry paste
1/2 teaspoon fish sauce
1/4 teaspoon sugar

I hope if you try any of these foods you’ll let me know how it goes. Or maybe you already have your own similar recipes and methods you will share back. Now I should know some Thai phrase to close with, but lacking that, I’ll leave you with my wish that you will have “Good Eating!”

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It’s a Eureka.

November 13, 2015agriculture, birds, family, food and cooking, friends, my garden, naturelemon, playhouse, sunflowersGretchenJoanna

I am now the proud owner of a lemon tree, for the first time in my life. Unless you count my father’s ten acres of lemons that I helped to pick when I was about twelve; I also learned how to drive the tractor down the rows a few yards at a time to catch up with the pickers and make it easy to load boxes on the trailer. P1020744

When I tell people that I am planning for a lemon tree, without fail they ask me if it will be a Meyer lemon. No, it will not. I don’t know if Meyers are often grown commercially, but my father always showed scorn at the mere mention of a Meyer lemon, because they weren’t Real Lemons. All of my experience my life long has been with the old standard variety, Eureka, so that is what I wanted.

The Meyers are more frost hardy. If there had been a market for them, my father might have been wise to consider Meyers, because his lemon crop was ruined by frost so many times that he eventually pulled out those trees and planted more of the orange trees that were safer and more profitable. I’ve been living most of my adult life we don’t get a citrus-killing frost very often, but just in case, my tree will be planted under the canopy of my huge pine. If temps in the 20’s are predicted I can cover my baby, and/or put Christmas lights on it for a little extra heat.

This would be a good time to give you one of my recipes using (Eureka) lemons. I see I’ve already shared my favorite Lemon Poppyseed Sandwich Cookies, Lemon Curd, and Egg Lemon Soup. Here’s a different one, a recipe it seems I’ve never transcribed into a computer document, which is also one of my favorite savory dishes. Lemon juice is not cooked into the stew, but juicy lemon wedges are served alongside bowls of these beans at the table and squeezed over in the desired amount.

When I discovered this recipe and tried it for the first time — maybe it came from Organic Gardening magazine in the 70’s? — it reminded me so much of the beans I ate in Turkey that I wrote the Turkish word as the main title of the recipe copied into my funky notebook.

GREEK BEANS

Greek Beans original-1

I don’t want to take time to type in the recipe right now because I have been so busy for several days, I am about to crash, and hope to get sleep for another busy tomorrow. Much of the hubbub has to do with the garden project. At times four or five people have been working at once, on three different parts of the plan. P1020680

Soldier son came over again and finished the planting boxes. He also got the Craigslist playhouse off the driveway and into its final resting place, after building a foundation and floor and then moving it on to the spot that he had carefully leveled. P1020697

These pictures were taken a couple of days ago and already a lot more progress has been made; I hope that next week I can show you the paths all complete in their several layers.

Today the workers didn’t need me to make decisions or anything, so I caught up with some friends. First Elsie and I took a walk, which we’ve been trying for months to coordinate our schedules for. I took her on my favorite bike path loop which doesn’t require getting in a car to go anywhere.

When we got back to the house we stood out on the sidewalk looking up at the sunflowers and wondering why the birds haven’t eaten the seeds. Her eyes traveled up a little higher and spied a kestrel on the roof of my house! I am a great one for not seeing birds; if I had seen this one I wouldn’t have known what it was. But Elsie once saw a raptor like this grab a blue jay from her back yard so she read all about them. She also told me a story about an Australian woman she met who had lost her small dog to a hawk who swooped down and carried the tiny creature off.

I decided that today was the best day to cut the sunflower heads off, because if the birds don’t want them, I do, and I don’t want them getting rained on again and getting moldy. I went into the garage to get my loppers, and lop, lop, lop — the three plants with the seeds big enough to find and eat were down. I gave one seed head in a pie tin to Elsie — the seeds were falling out without us doing anything — and she went home to roast them with olive oil, salt and pepper.

Mrs. Bread hadn’t seen my yard since the real landscaping has started, so I phoned her and she was able to come over. She helped me to harvest sunflower seeds, but we found the seeds toward the middle much harder to extract. We got tired of this digging and went to the store together to buy me a handbag.

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I am having an improved blogging experience tonight. Since last winter I have acquired a laptop and an easy chair, so now instead of sitting in front of the desktop in the corner of the house we call Siberia, I can sit comfortably and toast my toes by the wood stove. At first I noticed how much easier it is to think when I’m warm, but now….I’m getting sleepy…very…sleepy. I’ll be back another day.

Days that glow with butter.

November 12, 2015family, food and cooking, poetrybutter, childhood memories, Elizabeth AlexanderGretchenJoanna

This poet’s experience was not my own, except perhaps during my brief visits to my Grandma, to whom I am forever grateful for not being a buyer or consumer of margarine. I can still see the giant pat of butter that she would lay on top of a baked potato that she had slit and pinched open to receive the gift.

That mystical event of the tiger spinning himself into a pool of butter on the ground was early etched in my memory, too. It’s a food with special powers.

BUTTER

My mother loves butter more than I do,
more than anyone. She pulls chunks off
the stick and eats it plain, explaining
cream spun around into butter! Growing up
we ate turkey cutlets sautéed in lemon
and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles,
butter melting in small pools in the hearts
of Yorkshire puddings, butter better
than gravy staining white rice yellow,
butter glazing corn in slipping squares,
butter the lava in white volcanoes
of hominy grits, butter softening
in a white bowl to be creamed with white
sugar, butter disappearing into
whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple,
butter melted and curdy to pour
over pancakes, butter licked off the plate
with warm Alaga syrup. When I picture
the good old days I am grinning greasy
with my brother, having watched the tiger
chase his tail and turn to butter. We are
Mumbo and Jumbo’s children despite
historical revision, despite
our parents’ efforts, glowing from the inside
out, one hundred megawatts of butter.

–Elizabeth Alexander

butter art 97 crp

I love a tree — and the earth.

November 6, 2015food and cooking, my garden, nature, treesapples, autumn, koliva, landscaping, memorials, pineapple guava, pomegranates, soilGretchenJoanna

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The most exciting thing that happened this week was the delivery of trees, and the most beautiful one that came was the pineapple guava. I don’t think I have ever seen a more beautif GL P1020536 ul specimen of tree. And so big already, stretching its arms wide, eager to grow on a trellis in the corner of my yard, behind a sitting area.

The trellis will provide support for a generous eight feet in each direction, sideways and up, and the tree will be one part of the design that blocks out things like the neighbors’ big boat across the fence; it will be one of the many plants that help to turn my yard into a sheltered and cozy oasis. GL P1020588

Early in the week workers drove noisy machines into the hard soil and clay to make trenches for irrigation pipes, and for electric wires to the spot where a fountain will play water music.

Landscape Lady brought more plants in the back of her car and we carried them together to the back, succulents and yarrow and salvia; lavender, phlomis and kangaroo paws, some still in bloom or with fruit, like this darling dwarf pomegranate.

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Now when I look out the window I can see so much more than the sea of dirt. In addition to the many pots of colorful plants, huddled in the spot reserved for the play house, I see orange or hot pink paint, drawing out the lines for paths and planting beds, so the edging will go in the right place, after the dirt goes in the right place. Landscape Lady has had to draw these lines several times because the workers tend to smudge them into oblivion.

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Huge trucks have dumped three kinds GL IMG_0866 dirt of dirt/rock into my driveway: base rock to form a good foundation for the gravel utility yard, compost to mix into the unknown stuff that was packed into the pool cavity, and vegetable planting mix to fill the boxes.

This is what it looked like before it all was carted to the proper places. Tomorrow another truck will roar slowly down the street and back into my driveway to dump three times this much, 20 yards of soil ! that Andres and Juan will push in wheelbarrows to the back yard and mound up in the planting areas.

In the front yard my chard and collards and kale are growing; they liked the recent rain. The late sunflowers are pretty still, waving at the people walking by; I let the Waterlogue app paint one for me. I weeded and trimmed salvias and roses and more things out front, and staked the heavy mums again, on one of these gorgeous fall days that make a person fall in love with the e GL P1020602 arth.

This afternoon I made my first-ever solitary trip to the apple farm that has supplied our family for at least 25 autumns now. It’s a little late, so they only had four of their 27 varieties for sale: Arkansas Black, Granny Smith, Pink Lady and Rome Beauty. Even their names are delicious! I brought home Ladies and Beauties, and ate one as soon as I got back in the car.

I stopped to get some supplies for yet another koliva, the ceremonial dish we Orthodox make for memorial services. Tomorrow we will have prayers before Vespers, in memory of a parishioner who helped me learn to bake communion bread many years ago. As she doesn’t have any family in the parish who might want to do it, I offered to make the koliva.

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In this town I can’t get single colors of Jordan almonds, which are very traditional to include, so I sorted out the colors I wanted from an assortment. The bright chocolate-covered sunflower seeds looked appealing, too, so I picked over and separated some of those. I don’t know yet which I will use for decorating the dish of boiled wheat — except for the chocolate pastilles; they will go on top for sure.

Some recipes say that pomegranate seeds are essential, to mix in with the wheat and nuts, etc., but of course they aren’t always in season, and they weren’t when I made my first batches. Now I guess you can often find them frozen in upscale markets, but certainly in centuries past not all memorials were held in late summer or fall. So I didn’t worry about not having them. GL P1020612

Now that Pearl has moved back to California, she has a giant pomegranate tree right near her front door! And this time I have the seeds to add to my recipe. A pomegranate is a wondrous thing; I remember an orchard of them near my house as a child, and the first time I broke into a fruit and discovered the honeyc GL P1020587 omb of juicy red seeds. My grandson Liam eats each seed carefully, biting it and sucking out the juice, discarding the (mostly) pithy part.

One pomegranate yielded just over a cup of seeds. I boiled my wheat tonight, and ate another apple, and now that I have told you some of the story of my week, I will go to bed happy and in love.

Gladsome Lights

Things that I like, or make, or think about, with thanks to God.