This is a recipe
adopted from the ever-wonderful
Hugh Fearnely Whittingstuff. The reason for the adoption is this: Hugh cooks in industrial quantitities. I'm trying to find nice little vegetarian / cholesterol lowering recipes for one or two, so I
had to adopt this to make it workable, which meant coming up with a couple of different ingredients. So, I think I can add some value to that recipe although, of course, I'd love to try it out in the 'proper' quantities, one day.
Here's my picture of the green beans, aubergine and coconut while cooking. It's quite pretty, even in the dour needs-updating ex-council-house environment of my kitchen.
Do, please, excuse the floor. I know it needs sweeping. I have a cat. It always needs sweeping. Eventually, you get to the state where it can't get any worse; a sort of fluff-ecology-equilibrium. Oh yes, and there's a splash of a tumeric based sauce in the top left. IF I HAD SEEN IT BEFORE I WOULD HAVE WIPED IT UP. OK?
Right. From memory. Whenever I specify an amount, please remember that what I really mean is 'some'. All measurements are flexible. If you are a physicist, you will understand this. What
is important is the error bar, but these, IMO, refer to orders of magnitude in recipes, so you can forget that for a bit (as I have). So long as you stay within the order of magnitude specified by the recipe, you'll be OK, and you can adjust the second and third decimal places to your liking:
Ingredients
- One large aubergine or two medium / small aubergines
- One packet of green beans
- A handful of baby plum tomatoes or baby cherry tomatoes - about 4 oz or half a supermarket carton. The riper they are, the better. They need to be chopped so that each tomato is at least chopped in half, and chopped finer, if you can find the tuits.
- Around 50 g of solid creamed coconut - this is coconut that comes in 'tablet form' and is a boon for people cooking in small amounts who don't want to use whole tins of coconut milk. Look at your packet weight for estimates, but 50g is probably about the size of a large walnut.
- Olive oil or corn oil - not ghee
You're going to have to make a paste for this. Any extra paste can be frozen, as Hugh points out in his recipe. I still used about half the paste to make a small curry. As advised before, use fewer chillies rather than more and work up as you find the amount you most like.
Curry Paste Ingredients
- Thumb sized piece of ginger, if you have fat-man-sized thumbs.
- 4 - 5 shallots or a medium onion.
- 5 - 6 cloves of garlic
- heaped teaspoon cumin powder
- rounded / flat teaspoon tumeric
- rounded / flat teaspoon fenugreek (this makes it bitter, but it's OK - careful not to add too much, but fenugreek is terribly good at lowering cholesterol)
- Two stalks of lemongrass - also bitter - with the tough outer bits removed
- Two small apache f1 chillies, seeds mostly removed. I grow these, and I think they're quite hot so two, even deseeded, are quite enough. I would imagine that one thai birdseed chilli is enough. If you are using dried chilli flakes (which you can), I'd go for a small, flat teaspoon rather than a heaped teaspoon of those.
Method:
Whizz all the paste ingredients in a blender with a dessertspoon of water until they form a fine paste - I use a tiny blender I buy from Lakeland (I like it so much I replace it immediately it breaks down).
If you can't fit all of the chopped onion or shallot into the blender, reserve about half of it to chop and fry later, before you add the paste.
Chop the aubergine or aubergines lengthways so that you get about eight long pieces out of the aubergine and then in half so you have reasonable large chunks. Heat some oil (two to three tablespoons) in a frying pan until hot and brown the aubergine pieces in batches in this oil until they are brown on most of their sides, they're hissing, and the oil is coming back out. You may need to add more oil for each batch. The aubergines absorbe oil initially but release it as they are cooked. Alternatively, heat a griddle pan until very very hot and cook the aubergine pieces on that until they are cooked all over and start hissing. Let each batch of aubergine pieces drain and cool on kitchen paper to absorbe excess oil - you might have to stack the aubergines and kitchen paper two or three layers high.
In a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan, heat some more oil until its hot enough so that the air above it is wavey. Add any left over onion and fry until golden brown; then add half of the paste (refrigerate or freeze the other half for later use) and keep frying, stirring all the time, until the oil starts coming out of the paste. At first, the paste absorbs all of the oil, but starts releasing it when the vegetable matter in the paste is cooked.
Then throw in your pieces of aubergine, and stir until they are all nicely coated in the spice mix. Then add your handful of chopped tomatoes and keep stirring until the tomatoes have pulped down a bit (say two to three minutes). Remove the pan to a medium heat, or turn it down, and add the beans and about 100 ml (a small glass) of water, along with the walnut-sized piece of creamed coconut - if you have the time, mash the coconut up in 100 ml of hot water beforehand to make a faux coconut-milk. Stir, until the coconut is completely melted, and then turn the heat down to simmer, put the lid on the pan and let it stew for half an hour or until the beans are completely cooked. Add salt to taste.
You can freeze this if you don't eat all of it.
