Thai Green Curry Paste

Our trip to Thailand last year is one of my all time favourite holidays; the sun, the sea, the spectacular under water world we discovered Scuba Diving, the warm happy people and most memorable of all was the lip smacking food.

I fell in love, which is a little obvious because Thai food is famous for its heat and I am a self confessed slave of spicy food,but the delights of the Thai cuisine are so much greater than that. Fresh ingredients, simple procedures and a gorgeous balance between sweet, sour and spicy. I will always remember my first dish in Thailand, a chicken Massaman curry in Koh Samui; if I go back to Thailand I am definitely going back here again! We spent most of our trip scuba diving on a small island called Koh Tao so the food we ate at each meal was fuss free, simple food, quite often put together right before our eyes. I knew that I had to be able to do this at home and I brought back some essentials from Bangkok to help me out, dried galangal, kaffir lime leaves.







One of the things I ate repeatedly was the Thai Green Curry, with prawns, chicken, vegetarian, I devoured it and it is also the easiest  dishe to make. Being Indian we are quite used to the concept of freshly grinding our masala pastes for curries and so making this is easy peasy for us.  So here's what you do;

What you need:

• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 3 tbsp finely chopped fresh lemongrass
• 2 tbsp finely chopped fresh galangal
• 10 fresh green chilies
• 10 garlic cloves
• 1/2 cup roughly chopped onions
• 1/2 cup of fresh coriander leaves and stalks
• 2 tsp chopped kaffir lime leaves (since I use dry, reduce to half if you are using fresh) 
• ¼ cup of sweet basil leaves
• 1 tbsp shrimp paste or soy sauce if you want it vegetarian.

How:

• All you really need to do is grind all the ingredients together. This quantity gives me enough for a curry for six people, so tweak the proportions as you need. You can also store it in the refrigerator and it will stay good and fragrant for upto a week.

Thai green curry post coming up as soon as I get a better picture of it.