(no subject)

[pantryslut]

Want to cure an incipient cold and cook dinner at the same time?

I recommend making your own Thai curry paste. Any other dish that requires handling a lot of dried chilies is also recommended, such as chili powder from scratch.

These are pretty mild peppers. Still, my eyes and nose are streaming and my nostrils are tingling, but I feel good. I just have to remember not to touch my eyes.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

Oi. I'm remembering a semi-fiasco involving some Mexican cooking that I did with suzimoses and leback and akosut some years ago. The cookbook included a recipe for a basic hot red sauce to go on top of the enchiladas we were making -- essentially, it involved taking about four of the small baggies of dried red peppers, and removing the seeds from them, and cooking them in pureed tomatos for a while, and then straining them out again. That required handling a lot of dried chiles! Also, the grocery store didn't have but two bags, so we got powdered chilies to make up the remainder -- not thinking about the fact that straining them out afterwards was to reduce the heat as much as to prevent the sauce from being crunchy. And so it was _very_ hot sauce -- somewhere up near tabasco level, although a different (and rather good) flavor, and we had around four cups of it....

Yesterday I tried making a curry with parts from scratch, although I was doing commercial curry paste and homemade coconut milk. It didn't turn out to be tastably coconutty, though, so I think my skill in doing the making was insufficient.

(P.S. Argh! Sorry for all the edits clogging your email-notification....)

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

That is exactly what I am (still) doing -- deseeding a big bag of dried chilies. Then ripping them up into bits and soaking them in water. This dish is a multi-day process, for me at least.

I'll have to ask Mom what she did to spice up her enchilada sauce, the one reminder of my family's odd Mexican heritage. (Why it's odd is a story for another time.) I know she didn't handle bagsful of peppers!