Sunday, March 13, 2011

It's Complicated...

Last night Lee and I tried a very complicated meal - Thai Curry Chicken.
Lee gets this magazine called Beer Advocate (because he is obsessed with beer) and this recipe was in it.

When the first page is all ingredients, you know it's going to be a tough one.

First - some ingredients were hard to find at all. For instance, shrimp paste. Yeah, HEB was stumped on that one. It was only a teaspoon amount so we just moved on and left that out.

We started getting all the ingredients out and noticed I was missing turmeric, coriander, and cumin. So Lee went to the store to get those and I started to prep.

First, Logan was chilling in his bouncy on the kitchen table. This is his chill spot in the mornings while I am eating breakfast and getting ready for work.I clipped this activity thing to it and he loves it! Also - the boy is so long he sticks out of the chair.. nice.

Also, I would appreciate you ignoring the clutter everywhere in this photo. Eventually I will move it.. to another place to pile up.

Then I started chopping up things to put in the food processor.Then I prepped the veggies that go in the pot with the chicken.

I have never worked with a butternut squash before and that was a pain in the ass.
The dogs started dancing around the butcher block gobbling up things that fell, including shallot and onion.Momma, we can has veggies?

By the time I was finished cutting the most un-uniform chunks of squash, Lee was back with the spices.

The whole thing about this recipe is that it takes 2 bottles of a certain kind of beer - plus a can of coconut milk. It says to put all this stuff in a blender (lemongrass, shallot, garlic, lots of spices, etc) and blend until very fine, about 3 minutes.

Lee recently threw my blender away because it was a cheap piece of crap. All I had left was a mini prep and a leaky food processor (i kept it because I could still use it for dry stuff). Well with 2 bottles of beer and a can of coconut milk, the mini prep was far too small. So we went with the food processor.

The minute the beer and milk were poured in, it started leaking. We blended for as long as we could stand it and then just poured it into a bowl.

This doesn't include the mess all over the food processor that went, you guessed it, into the trash. Next to go, the toaster. That's another story.

So I browned the chicken and onions, then threw the veggies in and poured the sauce over it. We put it in the oven for 45 minutes and I made some rice.

Either my uneven chunk-ing of the squash or not enough cook time caused the veggies not to be quite done. So we ended up putting it back in the oven awhile.

All in all - it turned out great. But man what an adventure.Then I rewarded that hard work with ice cream and thin mints, because my mouth was a bit on fire from the squirt of siracha I added to my bowl.

Yes, that is a pacifier thermometer in the background. Our house is covered in Logan things.

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