Slow cooked Thai chicken curry soup

I have been very slack on the cooking blog front for two reasons. (1) I went back to some temporary full time work, helping out my ex-boss as he looked for a new assistant and (2) I have been living in an apartment with no kitchen and cooking facilities, hence much less cooking. Between the two, there has only been some intermittent cooking on weekends and next to no experimentation. My sincere apologies.

I do, however, have a post for you today.

This weekend, we managed to head home to spend 3 days which was glorious as I got to sleep on my own bed, which felt fantastic.

We also have a couple of nights home and I felt energetic enough to cook though I felt like I was coming down with the flu. The Boy has had the flu for a week and he has been very poorly. I think I caught it but started dosing myself with the doTerra oils "flubomb" and quickly overcame it. More on that in another post.

So, for dinner on Friday night, The Boy, who has been sick, always likes something hot and spicy to give a little zing to his little germ bugs.

I saw my friend Suzie post a picture of this Thai chicken curry soup which she found somewhere on Facebook and I really have no way of pointing to the original source. This looked delicious though, so I decided to make it. Plus, it's slow cooked, which is a bonus cos it usually means that it will be easy to prepare and I was not up to a complicated meal.

Here's the RECIPE for the dish:

Ingredients:

• 2 Onions (Browned )

• 8 Chicken Thighs (Browned)

• 1 Carrot Thinly sliced (Roasted)

• 2 Red Capsicums Thinly sliced (Roasted)

• 6 Teaspoons of Minced Garlic

• 6 Teaspoons of Ginger

• 6 Fresh Mushrooms Sliced

• 1 Can of Coconut Milk

• 1 Bunch of chopped up Basil

• 3 Heaped Teaspoons of Red Curry Paste 

• 4 Cups of Chicken stock

• 3 Tablespoons of Fish Sauce

• 3 Tablespoons of Lime Juice

• 2 Tablespoons of Raw Sugar

Instructions:

• Brown onion in a pan

• Brown thinly sliced chicken thighs 

• In a large bowl mix garlic, ginger, fish sauce, sugar, stock, curry paste.

• Put in slow cooker, chicken and onion pour the sauce over 

• Cook for 4 Hours on high or 7 hours on low

• Roast up capsicum and carrot

• 1/2 an hour before serving stir into slow cooker, roasted capsicum & carrot, chopped basil, mushrooms, 1 can of coconut milk

• Just before serving stir in lime juice !!

Explodes with Flavor !
Serve with Crusty Bread

Of course, I never follow the recipe exactly. I forgot to buy 2 red capsicums, so I ended up with only one.

I had about 5 carrots left in the fridge, so I used them all up.

I bought a small punnet of mushrooms, about 250g and rather than have a bunch of mushrooms leftover, since I was not cooking the rest of the week I decided to use them all. I also didn't slice the mushrooms but halved them instead as I wanted something chunkier to chew on for the soup.

I was very generous in my heaped tablespoons of red curry paste. :-)

I added 3 fresh chilis which I sliced up and added to the stock mix to slow cook for a little added zing and flavor.

I did roast the carrots and capsicum but I don't think I'll do that again next time. I think it doesn't make that much of a difference between roasting and not roasting in this instance because there is already so much flavor from the soup mix.

I didn't slice the chicken too thinly because I knew that the chicken pieces needed to be fairly large as they would fall apart in the cooking after being in the slow cooker for such a long time.

I cooked my soup on high for 3.5 hours and then added the last ingredients and cooked it on high for another 45 minutes. That seemed to have worked well in terms of integrating all the flavors and the chicken meat was very tender.

This turned out to be a very flavorful soup which was bursting with flavor. It's not a spicy soup either, so even if you can't handle heat, you would still be able to make it and enjoy a very tasty soup.

Add some noodles to it and you will have a Thai curry laksa.

A big thank you to my friend Suzie for the recipe.

If you do make this, be sure to post pictures for me to see either on Instagram - be sure to tag me with @langshipley or on my Daz In The Kitchen Facebook page.

© This work is copyrighted to Invest-Ex and Destiny's Fortunes Pty Ltd


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Red chicken curry

Once again, this is a post written a very long time ago but never got round to posting. Since the stove and oven (now repaired!) were of the fritz, I didn't do any cooking the past few days and the microwave is in the shop for repair (they couldn't repair it on the spot and had to take it away!). I hope to do some cooking over the weekend but that might depend on whether the microwave comes back or not cos I'm quite dependent on it for warming up leftovers. :-)

I'd recently posted about the gadgets in my kitchen with one of them being a Thermomix.

On the first night that I received it, I decided to give it a shot with cooking even though I had not bought it for that purpose (though it's sold and marketed for that reason!). I looked through their community website and found a chicken curry recipe that was fairly simple and it looked like I had all the ingredients on hand. (I didn't want to be out buying ingredients as I was trying to clear the fridge before a trip away).

The chicken curry turned out very tasty although the cooking experience with the Thermomix left much to be desired (I've since become much more of a fan of the Thermomix, which is a great machine if used for the right purpose). That said, I've decided to include the recipe here by converting it from a Thermomix recipe to a regular recipe that anyone can use.

Here's the RECIPE for a simple red chicken curry:

Ingredients:

• 500g chicken thighs cut into bite size pieces
• 1 tomato quartered
• 1 can 400ml coconut milk
• 1 tablespoon dark sugar
• 5 tablespoons oil
• Salt to taste

Ingredients for spices:

• 1/2 teaspoon fresh ginger minced
• 2 brown onions finely chopped
• 2 teaspoons tumeric
• 2 teaspoons ground coriander
• 2 tablespoons chili paste (sambal olek)
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

Instructions:

• Add onion, ginger, oil and spices into a pot and cook for 5 - 7 minutes on a moderately high heat until the everything starts to brown
• Put in half the can of coconut milk and bring to boil, then simmer for 5 minutes
• Add remaining coconut milk, tomato, chicken, sugar. Bring to boil and simmer for 30 minutes covered
• Add salt to season and adjust to taste. Then bring back to boil and simmer for another 30 minutes covered

Note: this will cook the curry fairly quickly but still give it some deeper flavor from the simmering. If you want to really let the flavors catch, I would suggest using a cast iron pot and on the last simmer, put the pot into the oven at 90 degrees C for 1 or 2 hours, depending on your timing and when you want to eat.

When I was cooking this in the Thermomix, it being my first time cooking with the machine and needing to clear out my fridge, I got quite creative with my ingredients. To say that I did not follow the recipe exactly would have been putting it mildly.

Here's what went down:

• I used less chicken because there were only the 2 of us eating - so it was only 4 chicken thigh pieces that I used. I didn't weigh them, but I'm guessing it's less than 500g
• I had about 2/3 a punnet of grape tomatoes in the fridge that needed to be eaten (no regular tomatoes) so I used all of those instead, which is a lot more than just 1 tomato
• There was a large lump of ginger that needed to be used up as well, so instead of 1/2 teaspoon of ginger, I think I ended up with maybe 1 1/2 tablespoons of ginger
• I didn't have tumeric, so I used curry powder instead
• I didn't have ground coriander (who knew there were so many spices I didn't have?) and I chiffonaded (is that even a word?) a handful of fresh coriander instead and used that
• I was generous with the chili paste and used 2 generous heaped tablespoons and then for a little extra zing, I added a 1/2 teaspoon of my special blend of chili powder. Don't do this if you do not like a lot of heat in your curry
• Oh yeah, since I was doing it in the Thermomix, I skipped a step and forgot to fry off the spices. Totally stuffed that up and I think it would have tasted even better than it did, if I had done that step properly

I served it with some brown rice and steamed broccoli (done the old fashioned way *grin*) and it turned into a very nice dinner.

Are you a fan of curries? Do you like them mild, medium or hot? Ever tried one that's super hot? Red, green or yellow curries for you? Any particular ethnicity of curries you are specially fond of? Indian? Thai? Malaysian?



© This work is copyrighted to Invest-Ex and Destiny’s Fortunes Pty Ltd