Recipe: Thai Green curry

A recipe for Thai Green curry that I've taken from Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries and then adapted for my own tastes.

Ingredients - enough for two

sauce
4/5 cloves of garlic
Thumb-sized piece of ginger
One green chilli
Handful of fresh coriander
One stalk of lemon grass
The zest and juice from two limes
A desertspoon of nam-pla
Teaspoon of freshly-ground peppercorns
4/5 spring onions

everything else
One large mushroom
One medium-sized onion

Packet of prawns (I buy them ready-cooked and peeled from Tesco)

Method

It might appear a lot of ingredients, but it is worth it and only takes 25 minutes to knock up a truly spicy, but fruity curry.

The only thing I've changed from Nigel's recipe is to take out the coconut milk - largely because it is so fatty.
Of course, it means you have to be very careful with the chilli which is neutralised by the milk, but generally it is fine if you scrape out the seeds beforehand.

The first thing to do is put a drop of oil in a pan and when it's hot drop in your chopped onion to brown it. Then turn the heat low.

After you've done that you can drop some rice into a pan and set it to a simmer while you get on with the sauce.

Simply chop up the ingredients and drop them into a food processor and give it a whizz until you've got a pungent, spicy slush.

By now your rice should be well on the way to being cooked.

So then drop in the sauce into onions and then stir in the prawns. By all means turn up the heat a little, but you're only trying to heat up the ingredients. If you cook it too long, you tend to lose the spark in the sauce and the prawns tend to go chewy.

Once it's hot, serve up the sauce on your rice and enjoy.