Gang Keow Wan (Thai Green Curry) with Eggplant and Bamboo

When I was in Ottawa a couple weeks ago, Krystopf and Atlas got takeout one night from a local Thai place.  There was one dish we got, the gang keow wan, that was so good I was determined to see if I could recreate it.  So here’s my best approximation, and it turned out pretty close to the original, minus the disposable aluminum serving dishes.

Get everything ready first, obviously.  The idea behind this is that if everything is sliced super thin and ready to go, the actual cooking of the curry will take less than fifteen minutes from start to finish.  Fantastic for a quick meal, which our Sunday dinners always turn out to be.

Start with your chicken (you can use beef as well, or leave it out for a vegetarian option).

Take 2 boneless skinless chicken breasts, slice them into thirds lengthwise, and then slice them up again into thin little pieces.  It’s easiest to do this if the chicken is slightly frozen.

Wrangle yourself a leek.  Just one will do.

Chop off all the dark green stuff, and hack it into thirds.  It goes without saying that you do this with separate implements than you did the chicken, unless you do all the vegetables first and then the chicken last, which is what I usually do.

Cut each of those thirds up into matchsticks.  Remember to rinse off the dirt before you eat them.  If you want to know the real scientific way to clean a whole leek properly (which I forgot about until it was too late) then take a lookie here.

Gather up a handful of hot peppers.  These ones are of the mildest sort, but you can go with whatever floats your boat and suits your fancy.  Cut the tops off, remove the seeds (don’t stick your fingers in your eye, OW OW OW OW OW), and make those into matchsticks as well.

Grab some eggplant.  If you have those tiny Asian ones handy, or baby eggplants, use about five of them.  These are the long thin Italian ones, and I used three.  Slice the tops off and cut them into thin discs.

Bust out some lime leaves (kaffir).

Grab a handful, and, if they’re frozen, let them thaw.  If they’re dried, give them a soak.  If they’re fresh, then you are a lucky person for living in a part of the world where you can get them fresh and you probably don’t need my instructions on how to make a green curry.  Go find something else to do.

When they’re ready, slice out the woody centre stem and chop them up finely.

If you have them handy, like, for instance, you are growing your own indoor herb farm (see tomorrow’s post!), then harvest some fresh cilantro and fresh basil. Chop those babies up as well.

As well, crack open a can of slivered bamboo shoots.

Put them aside with your other fresh stuff.

And you’re going to need an assortment of canned and jarred stuff as well.

In a large, shallow saucepan or deep frying pan, heat up about 3 tablespoons olive oil.  Add to that 3-5 tablespoons green curry paste and 4 teaspoons minced garlic and sauté that at medium heat until the kitchen starts to smell really good.

Add in as well 2 tablespoons each ground cumin and ground coriander and 1 tablespoon powdered stock (chicken, beef, or vegetable — this is optional).  You can add in some salt and pepper as well, if you like.

If you’ve got it, add some lemongrass in as well.  This stuff came in a tube!

Now add in 1 can coconut milk and, if you can get it, 1 can coconut cream (if not just go with two cans of the milk).  Make sure your cream isn’t sweetened before you dump it in.  I discovered that a little too late, so this curry was definitely on the sweet side, but still good.  Now you have this lovely rich greenish brownish soup.

Slide in your chicken slices and the chopped lime leaves and allow to simmer for just a few minutes until the chicken is no longer pink.

Raise the temperature and bring the liquid to a boil after adding all your vegetables.

Allow the vegetables to soften, and the eggplant to go a bit brown.  Then add in your chopped basil and cilantro.

Serve hot over rice, and eat it with a spoon in the traditional way.  I’m having some of the leftovers for lunch today.  I’m rather excited about it.

Related articles

• Phukett Green Chicken Curry (nuttykitchen.com)
• Chickpea and lentil curry (carolynchan.wordpress.com)
• Pork, Pineapple and Bamboo Shoot Curry (thenutritionguruandthechef.wordpress.com)

Cheesecake Rolls, or something like that.

The Pie wanted to call these things “fruit puffs” but that didn’t seem right to me.  I’m still trying to come up with something catchy, as these things happened almost by accident.

While I was away in Ottawa with Gren, the Pie had purchased some strawberries on sale and they needed to be eaten.  As well, in retrieving something from the freezer, he’d pulled out some cream cheese and forgotten to put it back until it was already thawed, so we needed to eat that as well.  Cheesecake comes to mind, doesn’t it?  Or a strawberry cream cheese pie?  That is what the internet told me to do.  But I didn’t have anything on hand with which to make a crust.  I DID, however, have some puff pastry that was nearing its expiration date (you see how I don’t like to let things go to waste?)

So I made up this bad boy of a recipe, which has a strawberry and a banana variation.

Make sure your package of puff pastry has fully thawed and your cream cheese is room temperature.

Chop up about 1 cup to 1 1/2 cups fresh strawberries.  Sprinkle them with 2 tablespoons granulated sugar and add a dash of vodka, to bring the juices out.  Leave that to sit for a spell.

Slice up about 2 bananas.  Sprinkle those suckers with 2 tablespoons brown sugar, add a few pinches cinnamon, and a dash of dark rum, and leave it to marinate a bit.

In a smallish bowl, use a hand mixer to beat together 1 250g package plain cream cheese, 1 large egg, 2 teaspoons vanilla extract, and 1/3 cup granulated sugar.  Then repeat that whole process in another bowl.

Preheat your oven to 350°F and haul out a non-stick baking sheet.

On a floured surface, roll out both halves of 1 package puff pastry until they are the approximate diameter of a dinner plate.

Place one piece of pastry on one side of your baking sheet.  Take one of the bowls of cream cheese mixture and pour it carefully into the centre of the pastry.  You may need to hold up some of the sides if it’s runny.  Also, don’t feel pressured to use all the cream cheese or even all the fruit, if it doesn’t look like it’s going to fit.

Now plop your fruit on top of that.

Then exercise all sorts of magic physics and wrap that sucker up like a burrito.  Or something close to a burrito.  Or whatever sticks together.  I found that if you had one end that was longer than all the others if you folded it over the top everything kind of stayed in place.

For the most part.

Bake your cheesecake burritos for 35-45 minutes, until the pastry is puffy and golden and the filling has set.

Allow them to cool most of the way before cutting and eating them.

Store the leftovers wrapped in the fridge for a few days.  If there are any left!

Drawing on the Furniture

On one of our various moves, my brother-in-law Rusty scratched the headboard of our bed.  Big time.  You can see it here.

Fortunately, until recently we had been using a box spring on our bed, which pushed the mattress up and concealed the scratch from view. Now, however, in preparation for our new memory foam mattress that will be arriving any day now, we have ditched the box spring (it’s gone into my office to make it into a guest room) and are using slats.  This makes the mattress wayyyy lower on the bed, and now, If I haven’t plumped the pillows up, you can see the scratch.

I’m not sure exactly what the finish is on our bed.  It’s something that’s not quite a veneer, not quite just paint.  Either way, I came up with an easy solution.  It turns out that Crayola’s black coloured pencil is the exact colour of our bed.  How convenient.

So I just coloured in the scratch.  It was that simple.  I mean the scratch is still there, because it’s pretty deep and shows up quite strongly in relief, but it’s a bit less obvious.  I also took the pencil around the bed and coloured in all the chips and nicks from the past seven years.  It worked beautifully.

If you have wood finish, why not try it with some brown coloured pencils?  I have heard as well that rubbing a walnut over wood scratches helps to hide them.  Try it!

Panko Chicken with Savoury

This is quick and crunchy and very handy if you’ve got a harried husband on his way out the door.

About an hour and a half before you want to eat, submerge 2 chicken breasts in about 1 1/2 cups buttermilk.  Add in some hot sauce (and/or tabasco) as well and leave that to marinate for an hour.  The acid in the buttermilk makes for a tender, juicy chicken that is hard to beat.

When the chicken is marinated, preheat your oven to 400°F and generously spray a baking sheet.

Pour about 1 cup panko crumbs (or other bread crumbs, brown rice ones if you are going for the gluten-free version) into a bowl with a pinch of sea salt and a tablespoon of dried savoury (or other dried herb of your choosing).

Mix that all together.  Lift one of the chicken breasts out of the buttermilk and let it drain before dredging it in the panko crumbs until completely coated.

Place the chicken on the baking sheet and repeat with the other breast.

Bake for about 25 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through and the crumbs are starting to turn golden.  We served ours with some corn and carrots.  Mmm, tasty!

Corgi Fun Time

I don’t have a DIY post for you today.  But I think that corgis make every Friday a bit better.

Traveler has been a friend of ours for over a decade.  He went to high school with the Pie, and then I met him when I met Stef back in our first year of university in 2001.  And he’s probably wanted a dog since then.  But with school and work and his jet-setting lifestyle, having a pet wasn’t feasible.  Until now.

Recently, Traveler began his search for a pet in earnest.  He was looking for an adult dog, so he could skip the puppy stage that would require him to be a helicopter parent.  And, having met Grenadier and fallen in love with him (because no one is immune to Gren’s charm — NO ONE), he wanted a corgi.  I put him in touch with the man who bred Gren, thinking that he might know a retired breeding bitch in need of a home.

It was serendipity, really.  The breeder wrote back that the one girl from Gren’s litter, Bahkita, was available.

The pups at 6 weeks. Bahkita is on the left, Gren is the big lug next to her. Photo by Ben Lobo.

Every dog in that litter had come out with huge ears (you’ve seen Gren’s, right?), and Bahkita’s were a little on the floppy side, so he couldn’t in good conscience breed her knowing her pups might not conform to the champion standard.  And as much as he would have liked to keep her, city by-laws prevented him from having more than three dogs at any given time, so she needed a home.

Gren’s ears at six months.

On the Friday night after I arrived in Ottawa last week, Traveler and I (and Gren) drove out to the breeder’s house for a meet and greet.  In-residence were Patty (Gren and Bahkita’s sire), Bahkita (Gren’s sister), and a three-month-old puppy.  Add Gren to the mix and there was a party in the making.  I apologize in advance for the blurriness of these photos.  It’s hard to take decent shots of animals who will not sit still.

Ganging up on Gren.

It was shocking to see how large Gren had turned out.  We had always known he’d be big for a corgi, and at his last weigh-in at the vet’s he clocked in at 34.4lb, which is at the extreme high end of the corgi weight scale.  I had thought that Patty, his dad, would be the same size but I was so very wrong.

This is Patty. He likes to climb people to get kisses.

All the other dogs present were pretty much half his size, with shorter coats and narrower shoulders.  Patty, whom I’d always thought was big, weighs about 26lb.  Bahkita weighs about 22lb.  These are normal ranges for Pembroke corgis.  Turns out I just have a gigantor corgi on my hands.

Don’t be fooled by the puppy on the ground. She was in control the whole time.

Despite being the biggest in the bunch, Gren’s natural submissiveness meant that he was dominated at every turn, even by the puppy.  It was pretty cute to see him getting beaten up time and time again.  He needs a blow to his ego every once in a while, the spoiled jerk.

More ganging up on Gren.

After playing like mad with three other dogs for an hour and a half, Gren came home and promptly fell asleep on my brother’s feet.

And outright refused to get out of bed the next day.

Traveler ended up taking Bahkita home on Saturday morning, and on Sunday night, after she’d had a chance to settle in and get to know her new family, Traveler brought her over for a short playtime with her big brother.  My pictures here are a little better, because they were both tired and therefore slower.

Already very attached to her new dad.

We look forward to having many more play dates like this in the future.  Stay tuned for Christmas when we will be featuring Corgis in the Snow!

I should be working but instead I made paper flowers

Happy belated birthday Momma!

By the time you read this I will have already come back from a brief trip with Gren to Ottawa to visit my grandmother.  Before I left, however, I was wracking my brain trying to come up with something creative to give her to let her know I was thinking about her, but something that would appeal to her practical sensibilities and also something that she wouldn’t have to keep around for a long time if she didn’t want to.

And I was doing all that wracking at work in the library.  Yes, sometimes I do slack off.  Only sometimes, though.  I took a lot of the following photos with my phone, in fact.

We have about fifty or so subscriptions to loose-leaf legal volumes, which are legal texts that update probably four or five times a year when legislation changes or when new cases can be used as precedents.  So part of my job is to go through each of these volumes, remove the selected pages that have been updated, and insert the new ones.  It ends up being a lot of paper, in the end.  I save the sheets that have one blank side to make scrap paper notebooks.  But the rest of it, the printed-on-both-sides stuff, ends up in the recycling bin.  Sometimes I can empty that sucker two or three times a day.

After my success with the Fruit by the Foot roses, and after looking at these cute gift toppers, I had an idea (and it also occurred to me that my candy roses would have been better if I’d cut them from spirals in Fruit Roll-Ups instead).  Instead of picking up some real flowers for her, ones that have likely been grown using questionable or unsustainable methods, ones that have been shipped in from a great distance and will likely wilt in a few days, which would require her to take action to get rid of them, why not give her a bouquet of recycled roses?

So I grabbed a handful of sheets out of my recycling bin and started in on this.  Fortunately, because I’m a librarian, I have a lot of scissors and interesting adhesives and things lying around, as well as a big desk to work with.  For this job, though, you just need some relatively thin sheets of paper, any kind you want, a pair of scissors, some fast-drying glue (hot glue or rubber cement work just fine), and maybe a pencil and a stapler, if you want.

Take your paper, and stack up maybe two or three sheets, to give you some volume and layers.  I cut my sheets in half to make them a bit more square.  Take your pencil and, starting in the centre of the sheet, draw a line spiraling outward to the edge of the page.  You can also just freehand cut your spiral if you wish, which is why the pencil is optional.

Don’t worry about drawing a pretty spiral, or even in cutting a pretty spiral.  In fact, the more uneven it is the more interesting your final flower will be.

Take a pair of scissors and start cutting from the outside to the inside of the spiral.  When you get to the centre, instead of cutting out the full spiral, leave a little circle at the end, not too big, but big enough.  You can trim it later.

I found it was a little easier if I stapled the future site of my final circle before I started cutting.  It helped to keep the layers under more control, though a little separation is both natural and desirable.  You can also staple the circle later.  Or not at all.  That is up to you.

Starting on the outside of your lengthy paper snake (the side without the round circle “head”), start rolling up the paper.  You’ll want it to be tighter at first, and then looser as you get to the end.  Keep the bottom edge of the paper all lined up as you go along.

When you get to the end, put a generous dollop of your fast-drying glue inside the bottom of the flower and fold the final circle down over top.  If you want it to unroll a bit before it dries, you can loosen your grip a bit, or if you want it to be all contained, then hold on tight.

And there’s your little flower.  Easy peasy.

Now make a bunch more.  I made five before I felt guilty and had to go back to work.

You can stick these puppies on anything.  I’ve seen them on presents, on wreaths, as garlands … whatever floats your boat.  If I had some more skill (and some decent floral tape), I would make these into stand-up flowers that could be put in a vase.  For ease of transport and disposability, I am going to make a sort of pop-out picture out of paper.

These cardboard squares came as packaging material from one of the books I ordered at work.  I think they’ll provide a nice stiff backing to my planned project.  I can use one as a canvas, and cut another to provide a backstop so the whole thing stands up.

I briefly thought about wrapping the backdrop in some form of pretty fabric as a nice contrast, but then I stopped myself.  The whole idea of this little gift is that it will be recyclable when I am done.  But I think the brown cardboard back with the printed white paper on front is a nice contrast in itself.

I rolled thin strips of printed paper up diagonally to make narrow tubes which became the stems of the flowers.

A rolled piece of folded paper makes a simple little vase.

Curled up cut-outs make nice leaves.

Tape a few strips of cardboard to the back to act as a stand.

 And there you have it.  A pop-out paper bouquet. View of St. John’s not included.

Jelly Bean Row

I love Quality Street chocolates. They remind me of everything good. And I love the colourful wrappers they come in. I’ve wanted to make something out of them for years. This year at Christmas I made sure to save all the wrappers so I’d have lots to work with.

Quality Street also appeals to my environmentalist side. You can re-use the tins for anything you like. You can recycle the foil wrappers that go under the clear ones, and recently, the company started making the clear wrappers out of vegetable products, so you can actually COMPOST them. How cool is that?

So what am I making with these?  I’m glad you asked.  St. John’s is famous for its colourfully-painted and artfully crooked row houses.  They’re often likened to a line of jelly beans, stacked on their ends — Jelly Bean Row.

If you watch any of those ever-popular tourism Newfoundland and Labrador commercials, you’ll see a few of them (though in real life they’re not quite so quaint — or clean).

So I thought I would make a few out of Quality Street wrappers, something to send people to paste in their windows, or to hang on their Christmas trees as ornaments, something that will catch the light and give them a taste of St. John’s at home.

The house construction is pretty simple.  I used black construction paper, folded in half, as a frame.  Then I cut out the frame using a craft knife and inserted and glued down the wrappers in the appropriate spaces.  Then I cut out windows and doors from the black paper as well, making sure to glue them to both sides so the ornament is reversible.

The problem with this particular material is that the wrappers always want to go back to their wrinkled state, and the construction paper doesn’t do a lot to prevent it.

A heavier-grade card would probably work better in keeping the stuff rigid, but at the same time, it would be harder to manipulate.  I wanted to make several of these hanging ornaments and create a sort of mobile for Doodle for her birthday, but the physics of it continued to defeat me — the ornaments were simply too light to be able to balance everything properly.  And I had it all planned so the houses went up on a slant, too!

Alas. In any case, they are pretty enough placed in a window or on your tree.