Having recently returned from 3 weeks in Thailand, I had a yearning to try and cook something as good as I’d had over there. Whilst in Koh Samui I’d done a cooking course that was quite different in terms of health and safety compared to one in the UK, but did produce some wonderful dishes, namely: Chicken Massaman Curry (with the paste made from scratch), Prawn salad and Spring Rolls (pictured below).
Whilst I’m saving those recipes up for a dinner party soon, I fancied a Yellow Curry, something you don’t see too often in the UK. I’ve previously had a crack at a yellow curry, with the pressure cooked recipe for yellow curry beef from Ferran Adria’s Family Cookbook, which did not go well. Whether this was due to the shop bought yellow curry paste (not easy to find in the UK), or my lack of pressure cooker experience, I don’t know – it just was very un-flavoured meat.
As a brief aside I should also mention a couple of the more interesting dishes we had in Thailand. The first would have to be crispy catfish, which basically looks like deep fried bread. The first time we ordered it was in a restaurant with no english menus, and to be honest we had no idea what we were ordering, but it is served with the most amazing spicy papaya salads. The most “interesting” dish had to be from the 2nd time we visited the Chaweng night market and my wife decided I would quite like Chicken Heart satay (pictured below), which I have to say was very nice, especially with the rice dog/satay that accompanied it.
After a little bit of digging online, I found the following recipe which involved very little use of the pestle and mortar (unlike the massaman paste I’d made in Thailand), the only subtitutions I made were oyster sauce instead of shrimp paste and pureed galangal instead of fresh.
For the actual dish I’d got some herring fillets cheap the other day, so decided to go with this recipe just excluding the lemon pepper and powdered garlic. I also kept the herring completely separate and threw some yellow curry paste in the pan with that as well. Finally the cucumber garnish was my attempt at a little bit of thai food art – it’s pretty clear I didn’t go on a course for that!