The Splat Cooking Blog

Fancy making this hot curry from northern Thailand? It’s unusual as it doesn’t have any coconut milk in – but it has loads of flavour and a really earthy taste – and it’s one of my favourites!

The distinctive taste comes mainly from wild ginger - a really strange looking form of ginger which looks a bit like thin light brown fingers (also known as Chinese keys).  When I first saw it I had no idea what it was – sold under its Thai name ‘krachai’. I always get really excited when I see something I don’t recognise and have to buy it straight away – then work out what the hell it is and what to do with it.
 
I also love this curry as it has has loads of veggies in it and its really really hot! In fact it’s also good for using up leftover seasonal veggies in the fridge. Anyway here’s the recipe:

INGREDIENTS                                           Jungle curry paste
 

200g boneless chicken thigh                        10 dried long red chillies
2 tbsp vegetable oil                                    3-4 dried small red chillies
2 tbsp fish sauce                                        2 bird’s eye chillies
300ml chicken stock                                   2 tsp chopped galangal
Mixed Veg                                     2 tbsp shallots
2 green aubergines                               2 stalks chopped lemongrass
a handful green beans chopped into 3        1 tbsp chopped wild ginger
a handful baby corn                                     1 tsp chopped coriander root
a handful of pea aubergines                          1 kaffir lime leaf
1 smll tin bamboo shoots                              6 garlic cloves chopped
                                               1tsp shrimp paste
3 sticks wild ginger
1 green chilli de-seeded and sliced                                           
2 kaffir lime leaves                                                                    
a handful of thai basil       
                            
Garlic Paste  
2 cloves garlic  
3 sticks wild ginger
4 bird’s eye chillies

First of all make the jungle curry paste by pounding the ingredients in a pestle and mortar one at a time. Start with the chillies, (de-seeding, soaking and chopping first)then work through the list pounding the hardest ingredients first and the softest last. Set aside.

Next make the garlic paste by grinding garlic, wild ginger and chillies together in the mortar. Cut up the chicken and heat the oil in a wok. When it’s really hot add the garlic paste and fry until golden (not long) to flavour the oil. Add 2 1/2 tbsp of curry paste and carry on stirring to stop it sticking. When it’s really fragrant add the fish sauce and stock and bring to the boil.

Add the chicken and harder veg and simmer for a while. Add the rest of the veg, chilli, basil and lime leaves and simmer until all the veg are cooked through.

I really hope you enjoy this curry. It’s best served on fragrant rice in bowls as it’s quite soupy. Once you’ve made the paste there’s enough left for another meal. (Store in a jar in the fridge for a couple of weeks or freeze.) Wild ginger is available on-line from Thai4UK.com and lasts in the fridge for about 4 weeks.

At the yeasted doughs workshop on Saturday, which, incidently went really well, the girls (all girls this time) I think had a great time and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves too. They made Pain au Chocolat, Croissants, two different types of Foccacia, wholemeal and granary rolls and iced buns with glitter icing (we had to fit the glitter in somewhere and you don’t get iced buns from the supermarket with glitter on!).

Anyway, as well as doing yeast experiments and loads of kneading we also made butter. This seems to be a bit topical at the moment and it was soooo easy and tasted great.

All you need is a small tub of double cream and a jam jar with tightly fitting lid plus 30 minutes of undivided attention. It is ideal if the cream is just about on it’s sell-by date, remove it from the fridge about an hour before you want to use it so it comes to room temperature (I know, this goes against all my food safety rules but you need the cream really on the turn if at all possible, if it’s really fresh it will just take longer). Fill the jam jar to ONE THIRD full, screw the top on tightly and shake – for anything from 10 – 30 minutes. Don’t stop shaking, if the phone goes, you’ve got another hand, if you’re a woman this is no problem you can multitask to shake and talk at the same time, if you’re a man, tell the caller you’ll call them back – sexist but true.

Keep on shaking, don’t give up, if a group of 9 and 10 year old girls can do it so can you. The cream will start to thicken to a whipped cream texture – KEEP SHAKING, pretend you’re playing the maracas on a sun-drenched beach in Mexico. Suddenly, when you are at the point of giving up, the jar will start making a thudding, slooshing noise, if it’s a clear jar you will see the yellow butter slooshing around in a watery liquid. The watery liquid is buttermilk. Drain off the buttermilk and put into the fridge to use to make scones and plop the squidgy butter onto a clean, dry chopping board. Using either two wooden spoons or your hands genly pat and squeeze out the remaining buttermilk. Any buttermilk remaining in the butter will make the butter go sour so you need to keep doing this until the buttermilk is all suqeezed out. Once done, you can add a little salt, or sea salt to flavour, wrap in clingfilm and fridge. Fabulous on home made bread straight out of the oven.

I’ve been asked to go on to Gill Gauntlett’s show, The House that Gill Builts, on Three Counties Radio on Sunday (Mother’s Day – just in case anyone had forgotton) from 3-5pm just in case you want to listen. Anyway we’re going to be testing victoria sponge cakes and I’ve been experimenting with different fudge flavourings. We have developed this fab cheat’s chocolate fudge recipe, well two actually, one for dark chocolate and one for white chocolate, they’re great for children to make as they involve absolutely no boiling sugar so are much safer to make than normal fudge.

Anyway, Alison and I were playing around with different flavourings for a Great Food Live show which has been rescheduled and rather than doing the plain fudge we thought we’d try adding to it, so what did we have in the kitchen…….

Orange – grated rind of an orange – fabulous in the white chocolate, OK in the dark

Chilli – need to keep experimenting with this as the chilli powder made the fudge taste a little like chilli con carne – not the desired effect so we’ve got some cayenne pepper to try again with.

Chilli chocolate flakes – I have these on my coffee in the morning and they are fantastic, goes a little way to stop small children pinching all the chocolate froth off the top, it really does help wake you up – well, this is great to roll the choclate fudge in to get that chilli bite.

Cardamon – THE BEST – this was absolutely fabulous in the dark chocolate, totally goes down as my favourite.

Marbelling – kneading the white and dark together gave a really cool effect.

Glitter – well this looked fantastic, but glitter always does.

Silicone ice cube tray moulds – the heart ones worked really well but other more fiddly shapes were awful and you couldn’t get the fudge out in one piece, so sad, had to eat it.

Still got to try stem ginger and fresh mint leaves, but this is ready for Sunday so guess what we’re doing tomorrow? I love this job.

Hi there, my name’s Indra and I’m a curry-holic. So you can imagine when Ali and I ran the first Thai cooking workshop recently I was in spice-heaven. Everyone agreed that making a paste in a pestle and mortar is like your own personal aromatherapy session – and then you cook and eat it as well – a sort of triple-whammy if you like.

We started off by chatting about all the different spices and herbs on the table. This gave people a chance to prod things they didn’t recognise like bright yellow turmeric root and young green tamarind pods (whilst having tea and lime drizzle cake.) Then straight on to the best bit – chopping and pounding. When I do this at home I don’t really care if I’m going to eat it or not (but I always do) I just love making the paste. Music on, beer open (at home that is) and we’re off. Using a big granite pestle and mortar is great too as it does a lot of the work for you – and sounds impressive.

The actual cooking is very quick and at the workshop we had 3 curries made in no time -green, red and massaman or muslim. We also made 2 types of rice, jasmine and glutinous, a hot and sour soup with king prawns (and half a jungle’s worth of galangal and lemongrass), and a sweet mango dessert with coconut milk served in banana leaf dishes. We got photographed by the Bucks Herald but I think the guy was keen to get away from us asap – all those people high on curry fumes! We had to have the windows open.

We sat down at the end to eat the curries - as usual a lot of coughing and spluttering over the very hot and sour soup. That’s normal – the Thais do it too. Everyone took home some of the paste they had made and a little of the other pastes as well so they could try them out at home. The rest of the paste just disappeared into thin air - didn’t it Bev. Is there another curry-holic at Splat by any chance?

I felt a bit flat after all the excitement of the workshop was over but am spurred on again now by my latest recipe idea for Chillean squirrel wrapped in banana leaf, gently steamed in coconut milk. Let me know what you think. Oh and if anyone out there is a curry-holic too and fancies doing a recipe swap with me that would be brilliant. If you send me one of your favourite curry recipes to indra.jackson@splatcooking.com I’ll send you one straight back.

I love Saturday evenings at the moment – DANCING ON ICE is back and this is one of those ‘when I grow up I want to be……..’ moments. My Dad used to play Ice Hockey in the Navy when he was based at Rosyth in Scotland and taught me to ice skate, albeit not a patch on what they can do on Dancing on Ice. Not sure what I’m going to do when it finishes, probably go into mourning until until Pop Idol or something starts up.

Usually we persuade the children to have a bath and put on the PJs and make up a big bowl of popcorn and sit down as a family to watch it, but this Saturday I’d promised Big Daughter (aged 10.5 years) that we’d make homemade Pain au Chocolat for Sunday morning breakfast. Well, to managed to fit this in perfectly with Dancing on Ice intervals! How……well,

When little ones are having their tea (5pm) you make up the dough either by hand or I cheated and put into the Kitchen Aid as it’s soooo easy, this is after Big Daughter had rubbed in the butter into the flour. Put the dough into a food bag and popped it into the fridge to rest. Roll out the butter, place between two pieces of clingfilm and put into the fridge.

Bath little ones, PJs on, popcorn made, Dancing on Ice starts……first interval, take dough out of fridge, roll out, remove butter from fridge, remove clingfilm and place onto dough, fold into thirds, seal edges, put back into fridge. Carry on watching.

Next interval, remove dough, roll out, fold into thirds, seal edges, put back into fridge. Carry on watching. Keep going twice more. Leave in fridge overnight and on Sunday morning take out of fridge, cut into rectangles, place chocolate in the middle – making sure it’s OK by tasting some first, of course! Roll Up and pop into the oven……..wonderful home made Dancing on ice Pain au chocolat! Much less greasy than shop bought ones and they tasted great.