Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals #9: Green Curry

Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals #9: Green Curry
This is our 9th cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. We picked this recipe for a few reasons: We had the episode saved on our DVR. (It’s always nice to watch him prepare it rather than rely on the book solely.) This one doesn’t have a dessert, and it also looked like one that could be fairly low-carb, as long as you didn’t eat the noodles. (I indulged a fair bit at my birthday last week, so I’m trying to make up for it.) And also, we LOVE green curry. 🙂

Substitutions: Not a single one. However, we didn’t bother with the “garnishes” of prawn crackers, chili sauce, and a cos lettuce. That just seemed like overkill for two people!

Quick verdict: Pretty good! The chicken was very good and the skin crisped up nicely. Snook thought overall the flavours of the meal were very tasty. We both liked the curry a lot, but we felt the kimchee slaw probably had a bit too much chili. We both felt it rated between 8.5-9/10. Not a homerun, but pretty darn good. Elapsed time was 39:09, but I can’t think of many ways to speed it up (beyond having the recipe memorised). There are just a LOT of ingredients to handle with this one!Pre-start prep: We got out all the necessary ingredients, tools, and cooking vessels, including the food processor. The kitchen was clean (well, as clean as it gets) and everything wiped down and ready to go. The kettle was boiled. We had a two frying pans and a pot ready to go.

First up are the ingredients for the chicken: chicken thighs (with bone and skin), sesame seeds, and honey.

Next, the ingredients for the “kimchee slaw”: radishes, red onion, Chinese cabbage, coriander, red and green chillies, ginger, limes, and sesame oil.

Ingredients for the curry sauce: ginger, chillies, kaffir lime leaves, coriander, garlic, lemongrass, spring onions, sesame oil, chicken stock, green beans, coconut milk, limes, and soy sauce.

Lastly, the ingredients for the noodles: noodles and a lime. And our sole garnish, a bag of beansprouts.

Pans, ready to go! The two frying pans are for the chicken, and the pot is for the curry.

Food processor – with slicing disk! This was our first try with the slicer. (You’ll recall the slicer on our old one gave us no end of grief.)

And we’re off! First step is to get the chicken thighs frying in the larger pan, skin side down. The Snook has also sprinkled them with salt, pepper, and olive oil.

Meanwhile, I got to work prepping the MANY vegetables for the kimchee slaw.

Here we go with the food processor! It’s worked GREAT. I didn’t even have to push down, really; it just sucked them down in and sliced them neatly.

The Snook has moved on to the next step of chicken prep: covering them with a piece of greaseproof paper.

On top of that goes the smaller frying pan, which had been heating this whole time. The mortar went on to provide extra smooshing weight. The chook was definitely sizzling!

Here’s the kimchee slaw once I got all the ingredients whizzed up. Pretty!

The Snook has moved on to the curry sauce. He found it hard to whack the lemongrass the way Jamie did on the show, so he’s just chopping it up here.

The lemongrass goes into the food processor – this time with the regular chopping attachment – along with ginger, chillies, lime leaves, coriander, garlic, sesame oil, and olive oil.

Whizz! And there’s our green curry paste.

Time to remove the weights and the greaseproof paper. The chicken is looking good!

The smaller saucepan goes back on the heat and gets used to toast up the sesame seeds.

Here the Snook has flipped over the thighs so you can see that golden crispy skin!

There was quite a lot of fat in the pan, so here he’s draining most of it away.

I got to work dressing the kimchee slaw. Here’s my pathetic attempt to squeeze limes with my weak, tiny hands.

Other than lime juice, the dressing is just salt and sesame oil. The key is to SCRUNCH everything together with your hands. Seriously, I scrunched for a good couple of minutes. I also squeezed out quite a bit of water into the sink, which he did on the show but doesn’t mention in the book.

The Snook has now put some of the curry paste into the pan with the chicken and tossed it around.

The rest of the curry paste gets poured into the pot along with the stock, green beans, and coconut milk.

Finally done scrunching! Here’s the finished kimchee slaw with extra coriander on top.

Sesame seeds are toasted!

The small frying pan now gets used for a third time to cook the rice noodles. Here I’m pouring boiling water from the kettle over them.

The chicken thighs get a good drizzle of honey for caramelization…

At this point we were monitoring three things at once! Curry sauce at the back, noodles in the front, and chicken thighs on the side.

The noodles cooked quickly, and the Snook drained them before rinsing with cold water.

I started to plate up. Rather than put the garnish separately, I just put it straight in our bowls. Here we’ve got beansprouts, coriander, and a wedge of lime.

The noodles get tossed with sesame oil, lime juice, and salt, and that’s them pretty much done!

The curry sauce is also finished cooking.

Here’s the finished chicken. The honey made the skin fantastic… but it also completely cemented onto the bottom of the pan. (I found it difficult to get some of the chicken out without tearing off the skin, which had stuck in the carbonized honey.)

And the final meal! We each had two chicken thighs, noodles, curry sauce, kimchee slaw, and garnish, and the whole thing was sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds.

Tasting notes: The curry sauce was very good, and it paired well with the chicken. The skin was fantastic, even though I did worry I wasn’t going to be able to get it out of the pan. (Tip: soak your frying pan overnight if you ever want it to come clean after.) I felt like the kimchee slaw should have been better, but somehow the balance was off. I think I had more Chinese cabbage than he did, and I wish I’d only used one chili instead of two. It was good but not great. This made for a very generous meal and we didn’t miss the extra “garnishes” at all. Lots of fresh flavours and some truly outstanding chicken!