Friday Night Take-away - Chicken Thai Green Curry

Whenever possible, which isn't often at the moment, we try to cook a take-away style meal on a Friday.  South Leeds is awash with take-aways that offer curry, pizza, pasta and any combination of kebabs.  Some of them even allow you to have your kebab on the pizza, which just sounds wrong to me.  A couple of the Chinese take-aways have started branching out and now feature a couple of Thai dishes at their bottom of the tri-fold glossy menus.  I haven't tried any of them, but it is nice to know they are there.

With Z's mum staying for the weekend we decided to push the boat out and have a couple of courses for our evening meals.  Tonight we went for a starter and mains.  The starter came courtesy of a vegetarian week sample from Z's workplace.  It was received in the same bag that contained the disappointing risotto from earlier in the week.

This was a Simon Rimmer branded Thai Potato-cake mix.  After the disaster that was the risotto I was dubious about serving these to a guest* but they weren't half bad.  The flavour and heat that they provided were spot on, fragrant and fiery.  My only complaint would be the texture, they were too soft and pulpy, but they are a great idea and I'll happily make something similar from scratch in the future.

Our main course was a standard Thai Green Curry.  The last time we cooked a green curry we used prawns as the protien, tonight we had chicken.  We made the same paste as that meal; ginger, garlic, lemon grass, lime zest, spring onions and coriander ground up in a food processor.  The chicken was fried in batches and set aside.  Onions, green peppers and broccoli were stir-fried with some of the paste, before a tin of coconut cream was added along with the cooked chicken.  The dish was finished by stirring through the rest of the paste so that the flavours were fresh and served with jasmine rice.

*even if it was the mother-in-law.