Thai green curry for cooking cheats

I'm a huge fan of Thai green curry and yes I realize you can make the Thai green curry paste from scratch in the Thermomix. It's Alan Quah's recipe in A Taste of Asia Cookbook. But I can't seem to justify making a wholetub of it for myself. Cooking for 1 or two is difficult and I'll never use up the paste (since it doesn't have preservatives, it's not like the jarred suff you can keep for months in the fridge). It does taste ingredible (I've made it before... but I had to throw 1/2 a bottle when I didn't finish it in time). 

 If you have a preferred brand of Thai Green Curry paste, let me know. I've been using this one for a while and it's my current favourite, but I'm keen to see what other ones taste like too. 

Ingredients:

1 medium brown onion

1 clove of garlic

1 dried chilli

50g olive oil

180g pork (in this case, you can use chicken or any other meat of choice - white meat or fish works best)

400g can of coconut milk

2 medium carrots (cubed/roughly chopped)

1 large zucchini (cubed)

100g baby spinach

Method: 

1. Chop & Stir fry onion, garlic and 1 dried chilli. Speed 5, 5 seconds.

2. Add 50g oil, fry on Varoma temperature, Speed 1, 3 minutes.

3. Add 2 tblspn of the Green curry Paste. Cook on Varoma temperature, Speed 1, 2 minutes.

4. Add (cubed/strips) Pork / Chicken or meat of preference. Cook on Varoma temperature, Speed 1 reverse, 5 minutes.

5. Add carrots & coconut milk. Cook at 100C , Speed 1 reverse, 16 minutes.

6. Add zucchini. Cook at 100C, Speed 1 reverse, 4 minutes.

7. Place spinach in Thermoserver, pour out bowl into Thermoserver, stir and leave while you make rice!

Winter Season's Soups for Thought

If you lisp the title is totally alliteration!

I love Chowder, so today's test recipe is from the Seafood Bounty cookbook. It's probably safe to say I didn't follow the recipe.

What I used:

250g of mixed seafood (you can just buy the generic marinara mix from Coles/Woolies)

150g of snapper fillet (chopped to approx same size as fish in marinara mix. I like fish so I put more in, could've used salmon... or any other white fish)

1 small brown onion
30g butter
300g milk (low fat)
100g thickened cream or double cream
1/2 tblspn of TM Vegetable paste
2 medium carrots (cubed/roughly chopped - can do in TM or hand chop)
3 baby potatoes (cubed, ensure larger than chopped carrot size)
Pepper & fresh Parsley (garnish/taste)

Method to my madness:
1. Add Onion to bowl, chop Speed 5, 5 seconds.

2. Add chopped carrots, and butter. Fry on 100C, Speed1 for 3 minutes.

3. Add cubed potato, TMstock paste & milk. Cook on Varoma temperature, Speed 1 reverse, for 10 minutes.

4. Place seafood in steaming basket. Varoma temperature, Speed 1 reverse, 6 minutes.
5. Use spatula to remove basket ingredients into Thermoserver. Pour on soup.

Serve: Add hand chopped fresh parsley for garnish, and a dash of cracked pepper upon serving to bowls. If you made breadrolls - perfect. If you had left over bread? grill / bake it a bit and have homemade croutons! I put garlic butter on mine and oven bake it bit before adding to soups.

You can also cook shell pasta al dente in the mix - I'd recommend add extra milk (100g-200g) Add your pasta in the bowl and steam your seafood in the Varoma (like the cookbook suggests). Pasat measure, 100g is plenty! Your chowder already has potatoes and carrots to buff it up.

Taste test - I used penne pasta (gluten free for it) - absorbs the soup better. It's not as thick as restaurant chowder but then again I didn't use flour or anything that contained gluten to thicken it. To thicken can also use the garlic croutons I mentioned? make that into crumbs and add to soup in Step 5.

I used low fat milk because I had it on hand and also thougth if I used 200g of cream I'd have to declog my arteries afterwards.

This recipe made me nearly 5 bowls of soup. Imagine what the full recipe in the Seafood Bounty cookbook makes?