Thai Yellow Curry Chicken and Thai Vegetable Stir-Fry

I am not a fan of Americanized curry.  We used to make a basic curry sauce at work, and I hated it.  Other people loved it, but not me.  So I decided to make a curry sauce that I like.  I researched it a little and there are so many different varieties and regions of curry.  I should maybe go on a curry making streak to find the better curries.  I found a recipe online for Thai Yellow Curry.  It sounded good.  I had two recipes that were a little different and copied a bit from each one to make my own sauce, since I didn't have all the ingredients to follow them exactly.

First I cleaned chicken thighs and put them in a pot on the stove to cook.

Then I made the sauce.  Took an onion and two cloves of garlic,

diced and then sauteed it in oil until a bit golden brown.

Added tomato sauce, ginger, crushed red pepper, turmeric, coriander, black pepper, fish sauce, lemon juice, and sugar.  Put it in the blender,

added coconut milk,

and pureed it all.

Then I put it in a pot to heat up later when the other food was ready.

Next I made a sauce for the stir-fry.  Chicken stock, fish sauce, juice of one lime, honey, rice wine (which I didn't have so I used red wine vinegar and cider vinegar).  Heated that on the stove then thickened it with a cornstarch slurry.  No picture of this sauce.  Sorry.  I had too much stuff going on to take a picture of everything.  Somewhere in there I got rice cooking too.

Then I got the stir-fry ready.  Used carrots, onion, red bell pepper, cabbage, broccoli, and mushrooms.

First I put chopped garlic in the pot with hot oil to saute it a little.

Then added the carrots and sauteed them a little.

Added the onion and let it saute a couple minutes.

Then the cabbage,

broccoli,

and mushrooms.

Poured the sauce over it and let simmer until it was done and the other food was ready.

Not a good picture, but the food was good.  The curry was a bit too much spicy though.  Next time I make this I will only use half the amount of crushed red pepper.  The stir-fry was quite good.  It must be the fish sauce.  Fish sauce, it's a strange thing.  It made the whole kitchen stink, but it made the food taste so good.

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Crockpot Lasagna and Three Bean Salad

Call me Garfield because I love lasagna.  People ask me on occasion what I love to cook the most.  I usually say, "I don't know.  Everything, except baking."  I think I will now answer that question with lasagna.  It's so easy to make, and it's so good.  I have perfected the cheese and ground beef version of lasagna that I call Five Cheese Lasagna.  I am now trying other versions.  I have a recipe for Spinach Lasagna that I want to make sometime.  I also want to find a good vegetarian recipe.  Mom has a recipe for Crockpot Lasagna.  I made that tonight.

Mixed together cottage cheese, eggs, and parsley in a bowl.

Set that aside while I made the sauce.  Chopped an onion and half a bell pepper.

Sauteed that with some chopped mushroom.

Then mixed in pizza sauce and ground beef.

I grated some fresh Mozzarella and also used some frozen that we had.

Then it was time to layer the stuff in the crockpot.  First the noodles,

then some sauce,

cottage cheese mixture,

and Mozzarella.

Repeated the layers three times until all the stuff was used up.

Then I let it cook on high until it was ready, about 6 hours.

Meanwhile, I made Three Bean Salad.  I got the recipe from a really old book that I bought at the used bookstore in Manassas a while ago.  Salads (The Good Cook Techniques & Recipes Series)

It's from 1980 I believe.  Some really interesting salads are in it.

 Anyway, so I used Garbanzo, Great White, and Kidney beans.

Chopped some onion,

and mixed it all together with extra virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar, parsley, salt, pepper, garlic powder, and some sugar.

I also made garlic bread.

The lasagna turned out quite good.

The lasagna was good.  Very good.  This recipe is a keeper.  The bean salad not so much however.  Too much olive oil and not sweet enough.  After we ate I fixed it.  Drained off the excess olive oil and added more red wine vinegar and sugar.  It was much better after that.  So now I know for next time; olive oil dressings are not good on bean salads.  Go with the vinegar based dressing for it.

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Meatloaf

I didn't know what to make for dinner tonight.  Mom suggested meatloaf.  I haven't made that in a while.  So I got a recipe that she usually uses, but I didn't like it.  It is probably one of those old Amish recipes or something.  A recipe for just the basic, plain meatloaf.  Now, don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with plain old meatloaf, but you can easily make plain old meatloaf into great meatloaf.  So that is what I did.

The recipe said to only use 1/4 cup onion.  Bah, I used an onion, 2 stalks of celery, and half a red bell pepper.

Chopped that up and sauteed it, which is one of the secrets to great meatloaf.  Saute the veg.

Then I mixed together 2 pounds of ground beef, 2 eggs, salt, pepper, oatmeal, and the sauteed veg.  I soon realized that I had to much veg on my hands, so I only used 1/2 cup of it.

Put that all in a bowl and mixed it by hand, which is another secret to great meatloaf.  Use your hands when mixing it all together.

Then I formed it in a pan into a rounded shape, which is another secret to great meatloaf.  Form the meat into a rounded shape in a pan.  Don't cram it into a cake pan or loaf pan.

Right before I put it in the oven, I spread plain ketchup over the top.  Now this is where you can all fancy and make some great mix whatever to spread on top.  I tried that before.  It was okay.  Nothing seems to work out quite as well as plain old ketchup, though.

While it was cooking I cooked some potatoes for mash,

steamed broccoli,

and made some gravy.

I mashed the potatoes with cream, butter, salt, and pepper.

I think I put too much pepper in it.  Oh well.

The meatloaf turned out great.

It was quite good.

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Pizza 6-10-11

Last night I made pizza for dinner.  Haven't made that in a while.

Made the dough.  Put the yeast and sugar in warm water for 5 minutes.

Added the flour.

I seem to have a problem with making the dough too stiff all the time.  So this time I added the last bit of the flour slowly.  It's good when it starts to clean the edges of the bowl, so they tell me.  I think it turned out pretty good.

Put the dough in the fridge while I made the sausage.  We don't use real sausage in this house.  We use ground turkey with a special spice blend.  Tastes almost exactly like real sausage, and it's cheaper.  You can't have the spice blend recipe.  It's a secret.

Looks gross, but it's so good after it's cooked.

The dough turned out quite well.  I spread them out on pizza trays.

Mom helped with the toppings.  We made 2 supreme of sorts.  The first one was pizza sauce, pepperoni, mushroom, onion, banana pepper, and freshly grated mozzarella cheese.  The second was pizza sauce, pepperoni, mushroom, shredded kale, and freshly grated mozzarella.

Yes, I said kale.  Mom went out in the garden to get onions and brought in some kale.  She said it smelled so good.  Wondered what it would be like on pizza.  I'm not afraid of trying new stuff, so we chopped some up and used it.

The baked pizzas.

The one with kale.

The other one.

They were good.  Very good.  I'm not bragging, well maybe a little, but other people thought they were very good as well.  Freshly grated mozzarella does the trick I guess.  Oh, and kale.  The one without kale was good.  The one with kale was amazing.  I think we found a great new pizza topping.

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