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18 October 2009
Meal Plan 911 Having a housefull for dinner. . .→[More:]I have a Thai green curry planned with veggies and (either chicken or tofu) over noodles or rice.
You could do a green papaya salad with cilantro, scallions, peanuts, and citrus dressing
or
summer rolls/spring rolls with rice paper, bean sprouts, carrots, cilantro, etc if you wanted to go with something light,
or if you wanted something more substantial you could do deep fried tofu squares with peanut /rice wine vinegar/soy/ginger dipping sauce.
A citrus sorbet with gingery cookies would be a great dessert, too.
Also, mail me some!
For some reason hearts-of-palm salad comes to mind. If you've got a costco, that would be the best place to source the hearts of palm. A recipe like this sounds good. Not too crazy, a counterpart to the spicy and rich curry/rice combo.
A much more pedestrian idea, which might mean you could throw it together from your current cupboard/fridge stocks: I sometimes make a (totally inauthentic) fresh cucumber dish to go with curries or noodle dishes. Sometimes I make a big pile and treat it as a salad, sometimes I make a small dish and treat it as a relish.
It's not so much a recipe as a guideline:
the main ingredient: cucumber, quartered and thinly sliced or julienned
the savory: paperthin onion slivers, or chopped scallions added at the last minute
the hot: chile sauce (rooster sauce, or garlic-chile sauce, or even fresh hot peppers, thinly sliced
the sour: rice vinegar, or apple vinegar in a pinch
the sweet: a sprinkle of sugar or a drizzle of honey
the salty: soy sauce or kosher salt. For some reason, I like the uncomplicated taste of salt in this.
the crunchy: top it with chopped toasted peanuts of toasted sesame seeds
It's very simple and fresh, with a little kick of heat or a lot, depending on how much of The Hot you put in.
And it's only now occurred to me that this might be a nice treatment for mango or papaya or even a spicy apple relish. Hmmm.
Yay! hi to the Mrs as well.
Enjoy your delicious dinner.
I'm going to try Elsa's salad sometime soon- that might be the trick to making me like cucumber for once.
Danf, what do you put in your green curry? I've got one on my meal plan this week and went for summer and zucchini squash and cubanelle peppers, but wondering what else would go well.
I marinate whatever protein I use (in this case people had chicken and tofu to choose from) in a mixture of green curry paste, coconut milk, toasted sesame oil, and soy sauce.
I woked onions, garlic some thai pepper, fresh from my garden, carrots, green beans, broccoli, snow peas, spinach and bean sprouts. I would have used japanese eggplant but could not find any.
Then, just used some of the cooked marinade added into the veggies, and let people serve themselves over some glass noodles I cooked.
The salad, a mango, a papaya, scallions, cashews, flaked coconut, with a citrus dressing (as per rmless2) was superb also.
Great, thanks - I'm totally gonna add in the carrots, bean sprouts and spinach when I make my green curry tomorrow night. I love the marinade idea with added sesame, never a bad thing.
Dang, y'all are some serious cooks.
It is so fun talking food at MetaChat. It's better than most designated 'foodie' sites, which are just irritating.