Thai Night

As usual I have failed to keep up with my daily blogging, and now have a store of pictures to share that would be more than anyone could handle. At least I'm consistent! So, I'll do my best to keep the length down.

Sunday night we decided to have some dessert along with the second disc of Ben-Hur. Fresh cherries and pastry cream... uh, YES PLEASE!

Ben-Hur was a good one, but looong! At least I can say that I've seen it now! We also watched The Losers. It's a good action/comedy with lots of stuff blowing up. Very entertaining. Not exactly award-winning, but fun.

Yesterday was mostly spent hanging around home, enjoying the last bit of weekend. We seem to have acquired a whole case of mangoes, so I was trying to come up with something to do with them. I decided I'd try to make coconut sticky rice with fresh mango. I searched around online and found this.

I had never heard of steaming the rice before, and I didn't have "sticky rice" so I used arborio. It actually turned out amazingly good! I was so impressed with my skills! (ok, I was actually impressed with this recipe!)

I soaked my rice, then steamed it.

While it was steaming I made the sauce and cut up 2 mangoes.

You all know how to cut up mangoes, right? Start by standing the mango on end with the edge facing you. Take your knife and make a cut slightly off center. As you slice down you'll feel the stone, just keep cutting around it. Do the same to the other side, leaving you with two halves and the stone. It'll have a lot of good fruit on it still, so trim it off as best you can. ( I have to admit that I gnaw on the stones until there's no trace of fruit on them. Picture me leaning over the kitchen sink, giant hunk of mango in my mouth, juice dripping down to my elbows and chin. Pure joy!)

To get the fruit out of your halves, cup it in your hand, and use a knife to slice a grid, making sure not to cut through the skin. When you have the grid cut just push the peel side up, essentially turning it inside out. It'll look like this.

Then you can just slice off the cubes! Look at this mouth-watering bowl of dreaminess! Yum!

So once I had all my components ready I put the cut mango in the fridge to chill, and poured the sauce over the rice as called for. It absorbed the sauce so well! I was worried it'd stay kind of crunchy, which would not have been so great, but it did just what it was supposed to!

Once the liquid was absorbed I stuck it in the fridge to chill too.

B decided to make some curry to go along with my dessert, turning it into Thai night! Here's what he did.

Start a pot of white rice (or brown) cooking, so it will be done when your curry is.

First he chopped up an onion and tossed it into a pan with some coconut oil.

then he chopped up 2 chicken breasts and tossed them in. Cook together until chicken is opaque on the outside.

Meanwhile, cut up 2 large potatoes into bite sized chunks and microwave until cooked. set aside.

Add to the pan a few tablespoons of curry paste (we used mild), and a can of coconut milk ( we use light). Cook this down a little bit until it looks slightly less watery, maybe 5 minutes.

Next he tossed in whatever vegetables we had around. There were half used bags of green beans and baby carrots lurking in our freezer, and they were starting to look a little sad, so in they went. A yellow bell pepper also found it's way into the pan.

The veggies were cooked for a few minutes, then a couple of kaffir lime leaves went in, along with 2 heaping tablespoons of peanut butter and 1/2 cup of water.

Once the consistency was about right, and the chicken and veggies were properly cooked (about 10 minutes) the spices were added. Curry powder, cayan pepper and smoked paprika. This is when the potatoes went in too. If you put them in too early they will disintegrate into the sauce.

At this point taste it! Make sure you have enough spices, and that the flavor is how you like it. The sauce should be a bit soupy because the rice will soak it all up.

And there you have it! B's homemade curry!

I put together the dessert, and it looked SO good!

B served up the curry, spooning everything over the rice. A sprinkling of chopped peanuts finished it off. This dinner was making me drool just sitting on my tray!

Unfortunately B and I didn't control our excitement very well, and ended up eating WAY too much! That sticky rice if super filling! We both went to work waddling and holding our distended bellies. It was worth it though!

What is your favorite dinner theme? Thai, Mexican, Greek...?