Thai Green Chicken Curry the Short-cut Way

I love Thai green curry because I find it to be more versatile. I can use it to make seafood curry, meat curry or simply a vegetarian curry and all will turn out delicious. I also used it to fry rice or stir-fry my chicken.

I called it short-cut because I used the ready made paste by Mae Ploy. You can find it in any Asian supermarket these days, this brand is quite popular. Once opened, you can keep the paste in the freezer. What's great about this is you don't even have to defrost it, just take it out and use it straight from the freezer, very convenient.

All you need to make a good Thai green curry is a little Thai palm sugar (1tsp.), fish sauce and coconut milk (or milk) and above 2-3 Tbsp. of green curry paste. For the above curry, I used skinless and boneless chicken thighs, sliced yellow onion, sliced kinda thick carrots and frozen green beans. This curry is spicy as it is but if you really can take the heat, you can add Thai bird eye chili as well.

A Day at the Zoo

Look how I crammed two of them in one stroller. LOL!


This is Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, the only mountain zoo in the United States at an elevation of 6,800 feet. It has herd of Giraffes and now total at 19, and the fun part for kids are they get to hand-feed the giraffes "giraffe crackers".


Look at this Orangutan and the amount of carrots he can stuff inside his mouth!



This is the baby orangutan that has been abandoned by his mother. Thus the caretaker has been taking care of him and we can view him from 12-4pm each day. This caretaker even sleep with the baby orangutan in that viewing window!!

Edda zoned out at the end of the day and fell asleep in the stroller.

Potstickers/ Guotie

I made Guotie last week, which is a pan-fried version of Jiaozi. In U.S., we called this potstickers. I have been deciding on whether to deep-fry it, boil it or pan-fry this little dumplings and ended out with pan-frying them. I think it's healthier than deep-fry and so much quicker too (since I can do a bunch of them in a non-stick pan). I love the crispy skin at the bottom and soft top skin with moist and juicy filling. Normally we serve Guotie with vinegar soy sauce and chili.

I made two dipping sauces for my potstickers. The top one is sweet vinegar soy sauce with chili oil and chopped scallion. The bottom one is salty vinegar soy sauce with sliced gingers. Of course I also have Sriracha hot chili sauce as an additional dipping sauce (not shown). Got to have my chili right? :)

Dried Lotus Seed Soup

My mom used to cook this soup for us because it's a cooling soup for warm weather. She actually spotted this while shopping at the Asian grocery store in Denver (she was here during my confinement) and recommended me to get it. Now I look for it whenever I go shopping in Denver.

You can also buy each individual ingredient and make this soup yourself, which I did also. This soup consisted of dried pearl barley, dried lotus seed, dried lily bulbs, dried dioscoreae (wai san), dried foxnut and dried polygonatum (yuk chuk).

I boiled it with chicken drumsticks. For sweeter taste, you can use pork ribs or pork bones. I only used half packet of the barley because too much of it makes the soup muddy.

For those who lives in Denver area, you can buy it at VietHoa Supermarket for 50 cents each, cheap right?

Common Chinese Herbs Translation:
Rhozoma Dioscoreae (wai san)
Astragalus Root (pak kay)
Angelicae Radix (tong kwai)
Codonopsis Pilosula (tong sum)
Polygonatum (yuk chuk)
Panacis Ginseng Radix (ginseng, ren shen)
Fructus Lycii (kei chi)

Chicken Curry Rice Dinner

Another one of my super lazy dinner. Can't you tell, I'm lazy all the times? :P This curry is made with Malaysia Traditional Specialties Chilliz - Meat Curry Paste. I added fish balls for Evy.

As for the rice, it's also my lazy version. I just threw cumin seeds, coriander seeds, dried curry leaves and turmeric powder with the rice and cooked in a rice cooker. After I tasted it, I knew this was not the way to do it, should have fried the spices in butter until fragrant then add in the rice and turmeric powder and not forgetting adding some salt, then transfer it to the rice cooker and let it cook. The rice will taste better this way as oppose to my lazy version. Lesson learned eh! Nevertheless, it tasted great with lots of curry gravy mixed in (everything in curry tastes good lah ;P).

P/s: June, I'm trying to meet your demand of posting more spicy food. LOL!

Vietnamese Spring Rolls

Decided to make something fresh and refreshing for snack this afternoon. Going with the roll here as I have seen all sort of wraps/rolls popping out in the food blogs to beat the heat of Summer. Also, I had this at V's house recently, so decided to make my own as well.

My hubby loves Vietnamese spring roll. He has to order this every time we go to eat Pho (Vietnamese beef noodle) in a Viet. restaurant. We like the dipping sauce there too, as you can see I was trying to reinvent the sauce for my spring rolls here. Haven't made this for years and learned that to wrap the roll really tight with filling was not easy. Mine was still kinda loose unlike the one we used to in the restaurant, this was also my hubby complain. Luckily, he liked my dipping sauce. :) Guess next time I would have to practise wrapping the roll tightly without breaking the skin!




The fillings for my spring roll as seen above are:
Sliced romaine lettuce, cilantro, tanghoon (vermicelli) and cooked shrimps (or you can use thinly sliced 
cooked pork) .

Click below for my dipping sauce recipe: