Green Curry Paste

Since raising two kids and keeping daily activities outside the house get the higher priorities, I try to spend less time in the kitchen without loosing qualities and quantities of the dishes. And how to do this? By using curry paste as base of ingredients, where the paste can be prepared in advance and kept for quite long time in the fridge. Then when time for dinner, I combine the curry with chicken, fish, beef or vegetables. It's always delicious and my family loves it. This way I save a lot of time in the kitchen by blending all stuffs and certainly less mess too.

Green curry is a variety of curry in Thai cuisine. The name "green" curry derives from the color of the dish. Other Thai curry dishes are identified solely by their colors, such as yellow and red. Green curry can be made with meat, duck, chicken, fish or vegetables and is usually eaten as an accompaniment to rice or round rice noodles.

This is the basic green curry paste I made... enough for making 3 to 4 times dishes. Stay tuned I'll be posting the recipes using this curry paste soon.

Green curry paste:
2 tablespoons ground coriander
2 teaspoons shrimp paste (optional- I skip this)
1 teaspoon ground peper
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon salt
4 lemon grass
2 teaspoon galanga
1 lime leaf
1 tablespoon coriander roots (optional)
10 garlics
5 sjalots
16 or less green chillies

- Blend all ingredients in the blender to make paste. Add a bit water as needed.
- Put the paste in the jar and keep it cool in the fridge.

Indonesian Traditional Sweet Layered Rice Pudding

Ingredients:
950 ml coconut milk
2-3 pandan leafs or 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
300 gr sugar
250 gr rice flour
100 gr tapioca flour
1/2 tsp salt
Purple (or other color) food coloring

Directions:
1. Boil the coconut milk and pandan leafs (or vanilla extract) over medium heat, then remove and cool.
2. Mix the rice flour, tapioca flour, salt and sugar in a bowl. Gradually stir in the coconut milk, blend well.
3. Divide the coconut mixture into two parts. Color one with food coloring and one part stays white.
4. Prepare a square baking pan or square plastick mold. If you use baking pan, coat the pan lightly with cooking oil.
5. Pour about 100 cc of colored mixture in the mold and steam for about 10 minutes, until the surface hardened. Cover the lid of the steamer with a napkin to protect the cake from steam droplets.
6. Then pour over 100 cc of uncolored mixture and steam for another 10 minutes. Repeat with the rest of the mixture.
7. Steam again for about 20 minutes, remove and let cool.

Banana Marble Cake

Finally I got the opportunity again to use my baking equipments. And this is for the first time in beginning of new year 2009.

I'm actually still lazy to bake something, but because I have overripe bananas and that is too bad to be thrown away and I know that from overripe bananas I can make something delicious. So I force myself to bake again...:o)

Most of the banana cake which I know is banana bread. I've been googling to find other recipes besides banana bread but it's quite rare to find that fits to my requirements. Because I want to make a moist and with light texture of the cake, then I try to combine using butter cake recipe and add with mashed bananas, and it works greatly. The cake turns so soft, moist and looks so beautiful with the marble look.

Here I'm sharing it with you...


Ingredients:
250 gr soft butter
200 gr sugar
4 eggs
250 self-raising flour; sifted
3-4 tablespoons milk
3 overripe banana, mashed
1 tablespoon cacao powder

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 190°C.

2. In a bowl, beat the butter and sugar until soft and fluffy.

3. Add the eggs, mix well. Then add the mashed bananas.

4. Add the flour, mix well. Pour into a 20x20 cm pan. Leave some to be added with cacao powder to make the marble textures.

5. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes in the preheated oven.