Vietnamese Chicken Curry

My Christmas very nice, if a little short. My boyfriend and I drove to North Carolina to see our families on Friday morning. I was able to have dinner with his family that night and he had lunch with my family on Sunday afternoon before we drove back to DC. We both had to be back at work on Monday.

The reports on the truffles have all come back positive! I'm so glad that everyone liked them.

Back in DC, it took me a couple of days to rest and get back into the swing of things. Last night, my roommates and I ordered pizza. I hadn't had Pizza Hut in ages. It was a nice change to not have to cook.

Tonight, though, I wanted something homemade. You would think that spending the entire weekend eating Vietnamese food would have made me crave something different, but the only thing that I wanted when I got home this evening was chicken curry.

The recipe that I used is an amalgam of my mother's recipe and one that I got from Mai Pham's The Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table:
3 tbs curry powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 lbs chicken thighs
2 tbs vegetable oil
1 tbs chopped shallots (I used half an onion)
2 tsp minced garlic (I usually double this)
2 tsp ground chili paste or dried chili peppers or chopped Thai bird chilies
3 tbs fish sauce (I usually add more fish sauce at the very end before I turn off the heat, but I like things salty)
1 tbs sugar
2 lemongrass stalks, cut into 3 in. pieces
1 in. piece of ginger cut into 3 slices
1 kaffir lime leaf (optional if you can find it)
1 1/2 cup chicken stock
1 carrot, peeled cut into 1/4 in. slices
1 1/2 cup unsweetened coconut milk or cows milk
1 onion cut into thin wedges
1 medium sweet potato, peeled, cut into 1 in. cubes
1 medium potato, peeled cut into 1 in. cubes
2 scallions chopped
1 tbs chopped cilantro

A word on the ingredients: Most of these ingredients are pretty cheap if you have an Asian market close by. You can find most of them at the local supermarket. You only need the Asian markets for a good curry powder (I prefer Three Golden Bells brand), the coconut milk (though I'm starting to see this in the international aisle of my local market), and the lemongrass (which I'm also seeing more often at Giant Food). If you can find some lemongrass at the market with a little bit of its rootbase attached, you can actually grow your own plant from the stalk. Just put it in a jar of water and place the jar in a sunny window. Replace the water every 3 days or so and in about 1 month, you'll start to see roots. You can then plant it in a container and have lemongrass in the house. I actually found kaffir lime leaves at the Whole Foods. I just bought a packet and froze what I didn't use for later.

Back to the recipe: It's quite a list of stuff, but I put everything together and finished the cooking in 1 hour. First, I mixed 2 tbs of curry powder and 1/2 tsp salt in a medium bowl and placed the chicken in to marinate for about 30 minutes, which gave me enough time to get the other stuff ready.


Then I got started prepping the vegetables. I chopped the onion and garlic, cut the lemongrass and sliced the ginger. Then I bruised lemongrass and ginger using the flat side of my knife.


Then I peeled and chopped the carrots, sweet potato and regular potato. After that, it was a matter of putting everything together in the pot. First, I sauteed the shallots (onion) and garlic with the chili paste and 1 tbs curry powder. When I started to smell the mixture, I added the chicken and cooked it 3-4 minutes on each side.


Next, I added the fish sauce, sugar, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaf, ginger and chicken stock. I brought all of this to a boil and turned down the heat. Then I added the carrots, sweet potato and regular potato and cooked those for 10 minutes.


I then added the coconut milk and onion wedges and cooked everything for a further 15 minutes. When the chicken was cooked through and the vegetables were tender, I turned off the heat and threw in the scallions and cilantro.


To serve this dish, I have used a couple of different things: rice, rice noodles or French bread. Depending on what I have on hand and what I'm craving at the moment. Tonight, I didn't really want to put a lot of effort into things so I served it over plain rice.