Thai Curry

This is one from the archives! Mom and I made this Thai curry frequently for an easy, quick, and incredibly delicious weeknight dinner. The whole family craves this; I have many memories of aching for it in the hours before 6pm, when mom promised dinner would be ready. Well, 6:15, to be more precise, as mom often was.

A couple of notes:

• Curry paste is cheaper and tastier if you buy it at your local Asian market.

• Looks like mom topped it with basil here. While not required, it looks fun!

Picture taken by mom

Thai Curry

INGREDIENTS

• 1.5 tablespoons yellow curry paste

• 1 can coconut milk

• 3 tablespoons fish sauce (or vegan alternative)

• 2 tablespoons brown sugar

• ⅓ cup chicken or vegetable broth

• 1 package extra firm tofu

• vegetables of choice (peppers, onions, eggplant, tomatoes, carrots, celery,

  zucchini, chard, spinach, whatever you like—HBs like:

  • 1 onion, 

  • 1 sweet potato 

  • 3 long carrots 

  • 1 red pepper

• Salt to taste

• Rice prepared to your liking

INSTRUCTIONS

Prep: Place the tofu on and cover with paper towels and let sit for at least ten minutes to remove some of the liquid. Chop vegetables into uniform, bite-size pieces.

Start: Stir together curry paste and coconut milk in a large sauté pan over medium heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Then add fish sauce, brown sugar, and chicken broth to the coconut and curry mixture. Stir until combined. Add chopped vegetables, add some pinches salt, and cover the pot. Simmer for fifteen minutes or so, until tender crisp or to your taste. If using, you might want to add the red pepper 7 minutes later than everything else. 

While everything is simmering, cut the tofu into 3/4-inch squares. Once the vegetables are cooked, add the tofu to the pot for a few minutes, just long enough to warm it. Taste and add more salt if needed. Serve hot over rice and savor the deliciousness.

Mom’s notes: This is a convenient dish for when the refrigerator is overflowing with vegetables, or there is a meat shortage, or your beloved vegan cousin is coming over for dinner. Even before the girls left behind their “I hate vegetables stage,” they loved to eat this. 

Weeknight Stir-Fry and Sheet Pan Tofu

I have yet to meet someone who doesn’t like stir fry. It’s quick, easy and flavorful — not to mention all of the good veggies that it packs. Now that I’m in college, I find myself even more drawn to recipes that don’t require hours of cooking and hard-to-source ingredients. I want something on a weeknight that will revive me quickly, so that it doesn’t take me over half an hour to feel like a human again after a long day. That’s what I’ve learned about adulthood so far, everyone is exhausted and everyone is hungry. Well, maybe we can help you with that.

Mom developed this recipe throughout her times cooking on Monday nights. She was always so clean as she cooked. Whenever I made my way down into the kitchen for dinner, I was always impressed by (and a little afraid of) how the counters sparkled, a pan piled high with golden tofu and the greens and reds of bell peppers. Even the stove was clean. When I start to cook, on the other hand, I can see the stove begin to tremble, knowing full well what I’m capable of doing to it. We all have our styles, I guess, but either way, no matter who makes it, we love this dish.

Note: You can add the tofu in as is, as I would at my apartment, or, if you’d like better texture and more flavor, you can follow instructions below the recipe for mom’s baked tofu.

WEEKNIGHT STIR-FRY

Ingredients

• 1 block extra firm tofu (prepare ahead if you would like the chewy version, or just cut into half inch squares to add at the end)

• 1 tablespoon peanut, canola, vegetable, or grapeseed oil

• One large onion, cut in half and sliced

• One red pepper, sliced

• Two cloves garlic, sliced thin

• 1/2 inch fresh ginger, peeled and diced (or more, according to taste)

• Mushrooms, any type you prefer, cleaned and sliced (mom used 2/3 of a package of whole mushrooms)

• 1 cup snap peas make a great addition if they’re in season!

For the sauce:

• 3 tablespoons oyster sauce

• 2 tablespoons soy sauce

• 1 tablespoon rice vinegar

• 1 teaspoon fish sauce

Instructions

Stir all sauce ingredients in liquid measuring cup and set aside.

Prepare all ingredients according to the notes above ahead of time – cooking goes fast.

Prepare brown rice or have rice noodles ready to prepare.

Heat oil in a large nonstick sauté pan or wok.

Sauté onion in oil over medium high heat for three minutes. Add the red pepper and sauté two minutes more.

Add garlic and ginger and sauté for 30 seconds. Then add mushrooms (and snap peas, if using) and sauté one or two minutes more. Add sauce and cook for one or two minutes. Put in cubed tofu to warm and then serve over rice noodles or cooked rice.

the wrong way to press tofu

TOFU

Ingredients

• 1 block tofu

• Olive oil

• Soy sauce (optional)

• Chili garlic sauce (optional)

• Salt & pepper

• Garlic pepper (optional)

1. Drain the tofu. First things first — even the most firm varieties of tofu contain lots of extra water. In order to get our tofu nice and crispy, we need to drain some of that water out. To do so, put your tofu on a paper towel and lay another paper towel on top. Then, place a cutting board on top and stack a bunch of heavy cans or pots or whatever else you can safely balance on the board. The idea is to put a lot of pressure/weight on the tofu, which will help the excess water to press out into the paper towels. Let it drain for 15-30 minutes.

2. Cut the tofu. Once the tofu has drained, remove the weights and paper towels. Cut the tofu into desired shape, mom usually made little cubes (roughly 3/4 inch each), but you can cut triangles, rectangles, or anything else that tickles your fancy. Just note that the thickness of your shapes will determine your crispy-outside to soft-inside ration, so if you want even cripier bites of tofu, make your shapes a bit thinner.

3. Coat the tofu. Add the tofu to a large mixing bowl and drizzle it with roughly 2 Tbs olive oil, tossing gently to coat. Then add liquid seasonings: Mom used 1 tsp soy sauce and 2 tsp chili garlic sauce, I like more (2 Tbs soy sauce, 1 Tb chili garlic sauce), and some people like it plain! Sprinkle evenly with about 1 Tb of cornstarch and remaining seasonings (salt, pepper, garlic powder). I don’t measure these, but a good rule of thumb is to not be afraid of salt and pepper and to be just a little afraid of garlic powder.

4. Arrange on a baking sheet. Turn the tofu out onto a parchment-covered baking sheet and arrange so that the tofu is in an even layer (not overlapping). It is okay if some of the pieces break up a little, with tofu that is, I’m afraid, inevitable.

5. Bake until crispy. Bake at 400°F for 15 minutes. Then remove the baking sheet from the oven and flip each of the tofu bites so that they can cook evenly on the other side for 15 minutes more (or until they reach your desired level of crisipiness). Depending on how much soy sauce you use, they may look quite toasted after the first 15 minutes, but will likely still be soft, so check with a careful finger! Remove from oven and add to recipe!

Red Sauce

When John Tomarchio was a young professor in Boston University’s Core Curriculum program, he often stopped by my (Kate’s) office. Sometimes he needed my support as program manager (my first job out of college), and sometimes he wanted to talk about food. John was super kind and I learned from him how to be a grown up and also how to be a good human. More to the point, I learned how to make red sauce.

Although the sauce as he explained it only had five ingredients, it must have taken him twenty minutes to explain the process, because he wanted me to get it right (and also he was passionate and possibly a bit theatrical). Following his careful instructions, I’ve always gotten it right. I hope now that you will, too!

Red Sauce

My understanding of John’s method is colored by the habits I’ve formed over the years—his lesson was more than twenty years ago. So I want to honor him for the life lesson but not (mis)represent this as his exact recipe, which I know it is not. Here is the original’s grateful descendant.

1 tablespoon olive oil
5 cloves garlic, smashed and peeled
3 tablespoons tomato paste
1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes*
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 pinch red pepper, optional

Heat a large saute pan over medium heat and add the olive oil once water sizzles when it hits the pan. Add the oil and give it thirty seconds to warm up as well, then add the whole-but-smashed cloves of garlic. In my view, what you do next is the most important step to the quality of the final sauce.

Cook the garlic slowly and gently and Do Not Scorch the Garlic! If the pan seems too hot, remove it immediately from the burner to cool off. You want the oil to barely simmer around the garlic, so that the cloves slowly turn a golden brown. This usually takes me three to five minutes.

Once the cloves are golden brown, add the tomato paste, salt, oregano, and optional dried red pepper. (John didn’t use tomato paste, but it adds a depth that we like. He also didn’t use oregano—he added fresh basil at the end. But we often find ourselves without fresh basil.) Stir for a minute, then add the tomatoes. Simmer for five or ten minutes. You want the sauce to cook down and thicken, but not become too thick. If it cooks until it becomes too thick, you can add a little pasta water. When you think it looks right, turn off the stove and taste a bit. Does it want more salt? How about some freshly ground pepper? If it’s too acidic, try adding a scant teaspoon of table sugar. (If you always use Pastene canned whole tomatoes, it will never be too acidic. Of course, home-bottled tomatoes also work beautifully.) I can’t buy Pastene now that I live in the West, and it’s terribly sad. In fact, this post made me investigate my Pastene shipping options. The only place I can find them is the manufacturer, located in Massachusetts, and I’d love to support them. But shipping is pricey. I have a twelve-pack loaded into my shopping cart and my credit card number entered—will I push the button to purchase?)

 Add to 1 pound freshly cooked, al dente spaghetti or linguini, top with freshly-grated parmigiano-reggiano, and serve. Or use this for lasagna or pizza sauce, a spaghetti squash gratin or calzone. Options abound, each of them delicious.

*John advised me to use whole peeled tomatoes with the reasoning that they use blemished tomatoes for the crushed and diced cans and the best quality ones for the cans of whole tomatoes. At some point I veered away from his advice, thinking the chopped were easier to deal with. But something has been brewing in me recently, and when making this batch, I decided definitely that in future I will avoid chopped tomatoes. They don’t break down no matter how long you cook them!

A Simple, Perfect Roast

Recently we’ve taken to having a roast on the first Sunday of each month, when we’re all extra hungry for dinner and ready for something soothing, warm, and filling. This recipe hails from our friends the Gublers when they were living in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood and learned they could get brisket on sale on Saturdays. They started making a weekly roast with the meat. We’ve changed the recipe a bit and changed the preparation from oven to slow cooker, but we’ll ever be grateful to the Gublers and their neighbors for the original inspiration of slow-simmered roast with carrots and onions.

This is a very good roast. The carrots are a favorite of mine (Amelia); they get soft and succulent from the dripping meaty juices. In combination with the warm meat, it’s to die for. We love serving this with a slice of good bread to soak up the juices.

 A Perfect, Simple Roast

 

2 medium to large onions, quartered

10 long carrots, cut into thick coins or diagonals (around 1 1/2 pounds, although the amount isn’t important. You could also use baby carrots for ease, they’re just a little less attractive imo)

Chunk of butter*

2­–4 pounds rump roast or brisket, depending on your needs

Salt (around two teaspoons, but a bit more if the roast is over two pounds)

1 cup red wine*

2 tablespoons tomato paste (3 if the roast is over 3 pounds)

4 cloves garlic, smashed and peeled but left whole

pepper

Place onions into the slow cooker, followed by most of the carrots.

Heat a large sauté pan (large enough to hold the roast) on the stove over medium-high heat. Melt butter on the hot pan, then add the meat to brown for a few minutes on its side. Brown another side or two, in the same manner. Salt it generously on different sides as it cook. Then move the roast into the slow cooker, setting it on top of the carrots and onions.

Pour wine into the hot sauté pan to deglaze, stirring up any meat bits left from the roast. Then add the tomato paste and let it melt in the hot wine. Pour the liquid over the roast, toss in the garlic cloves, then cook on low for 8 hours or high for 1 1/2 and low for 5-6.

Although we usually eat this with a slice of good bread, as mentioned above, it’s also very good over egg noodles. Sometimes we slice it, as in the photos here, but other times we pull it apart with forks into large chunks.

*As for the butter, one of the best cooks I know, a tall robust, and elegant woman with black hair and bright blue eyes from Azerbaijan, taught me that red meat always tastes better cooked with butter than with oil. I don’t cook a lot of red meat, and when I do the dish doesn’t always accommodate her advice. But it does here and I wanted to pass it along.

*We know very little about alcohol, so at the liquor store we ask an employee for help, explaining we need a red wine for cooking a roast in the range of 7 or 8 dollars. Please don’t use cooking wine—it will taste terrible. We’ve wondered about making this with grape or cranberry juice—let us know if you try.