Stir Fried Beef with Garlic and Basil

This should be Thai basil. I couldn't find any in Brooklyn Heights at 10pm on Tuesday night. So this giant Italian basil which are milder would do. I would compensate with more garlic and chilies. This, like any other stir-fried, is extremely fast and easy to make.



Ingredients

• 1/2 pound top sirloin - sliced into thin strips


• 1 cup packed fresh basil leaves - roughly torn


• 3 cloves garlic - chopped


• 8 Thai chilies - halved


• 1 teaspoon dark soy sauce


• Fish sauce to taste - about 1 teaspoon


• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil


• 1/4 cup chicken broth or water

Directions

1. In a large pan over high heat, heat up oil until hot enough to cover the bottom of the pan. Stir in chopped garlic.


2. When the garlic is lightly brown, add beef. Season with soy sauce. If the pan becomes too dry, add broth or water.


3. When the beef is nicely cooked and brown, add basil and chilies. Add fish sauce to taste. When basil is wilted, turn off the heat and serve.

This dish would normally be served on top of steamed rice with a fried egg. But I'm on a South Beach diet right now. Can't eat too much carbohydrate. And I already had 2 eggs this morning. So I'll just have to do without.

Beef Curry with Thai Eggplants and Chinese String Beans

What the heck are Thai eggplants and Chinese string beans, you ask. I got pictures for you.


Thai eggplants

We use these eggplants a lot in curry. In Thailand, we call them striped tomatoes. We call all eggplants some kind of tomatoes. For example, purple tomatoes for the purple Chinese eggplants. What do we call tomatoes? Red tomatoes... Duh.. I didn't like eating them so much for they were a little bitter. But now whenever I see them in Chinatown, I get extremely excited. Not that I like eating them any better, I just get excited.


Chinese string beans

Actually, these are the only kind of string beans I had until I came to the U.S. Don't they make much more sense than American string beans? They take less time to trim and clean. They taste much more like string beans to me. And because they are so long, I can tie them up into pretty knots. Also, nuts and beans are the same word in Thai. I guess we don't have too many words to call things. We just keep reusing them and add adjective to identify what we actually mean.



When you say curry, Thai people will assume you mean red curry. Therefore, when I was asked to make beef curry, I made this.

Ingredients (Make 10 to 15 servings)

• 4 pounds beef - any flavorful cut - I used London Broil - cut into strips


• 2 pounds Thai eggplants - quartered - or any firm eggplants


• 1 pound Chinese string beans or normal string beans - cut - and if you are like me, tie them into knots


• 3 cans coconut milk


• 1 tablespoon cooking oil


• 1 cup red curry paste


• 1 head garlic


• About 2 inches knob of ginger


• 6 shallots


• 3 stalks of lemongrass


• 1 tablespoon dry red pepper flakes


• 1 tablespoon brown sugar


• Fish sauce


• 1 cup Thai basil

Directions

1. Peel garlic, ginger and shallots. Discard a few outer layers of lemongrass. Trim away its head and about 2/3 from its tail. Keep the middle 1/3. Chop all the spices together (I used food processor.)


2. Heat oil in a large stock pot. Stir in chopped spices and curry paste. When fragrant, add the first can of coconut milk and beef. Let cook. Stir occasionally until the meat is almost cooked.


3. Add the rest of coconut milk. Season to taste with red pepper, sugar and fish sauce. Let simmer. Add water if necessary.


4. When the meat is tender, add eggplants and string beans. Let cook for 5 more minutes or until the vegetables have desired texture. I like mine soft but still a little crunchy.


5. Before serving, tear Thai basil and sprinkle on the curry. Serve with rice.

Beef Green Curry with Chinese Eggplants

After a few weekends of eating out in fancy restaurants, I felt a need for home cooked food. I enjoy eating out. But the bill and the commute home with extremely full stomach are not quite ideal. So I plot to invite a few of my friends over for dinner at my apartment on Sunday night instead of eating out. This way there's no bill and no commute home (for me). And my food is as good as any restaurant food. Perfect!

I made Miang-Kum. It was perfect for the hot weather and my chilli loving friends. With stems leftover from collard green I used for Miang-Kum, I made collard green stem spicy salad. The recipe is kind of experimental but I'll post it here soon.

And for the main dish, I made beef green curry with Chinese eggplants served with rice - which was very well received by my guests.



Ingredients

• 2 pounds of beef (I used top sirloin) - sliced


• 2 Chinese eggplants, cleaned, trimmed and cut into chunks


• 1 head of garlic - peeled


• About 3 inches of ginger - peeled


• 5 shallots


• 5 kafir lime leaves (or substitute with lime zest)


• 2 cans coconut milk


• 1/2 cup green curry paste


• 1 tablespoon cooking oil


• 1 teaspoon raw sugar


• Fish sauce to taste


• About a cup of picked Thai basil

Directions

1. Chop garlic, ginger, shallots and lime leaves really finely. I put everything in a food processor and let it run for about 1 minute.


2. Coat the bottom of a large pot with oil and place on a stove top at medium high heat. Stir curry paste and chopped spice in the heated pot for about 30 seconds. Be careful not to burn.


3. Pour two cans of coconut milk into the pot. Add beef. Reduce the heat to medium and let the beef cooked. Stir occasionally so that pieces of beef cooked evenly.


4. When the beef is cooked, reduce the heat to low and add eggplants. Add sugar and fish sauce to taste. Take care not to let the curry bubble or boil.


5. When the eggplants are cooked and soft but not too soft, turn off the heat. Sprinkle Thai basil over the curry. Serve with cooked rice.

I wish eggplants keep their color when cooked. The dish would have been much prettier.

Massaman Curry

Or the best spicy beef stew recipe ever ever. My friends love love love this curry. I got a special request for it for our biggest potluck party of the year. I pointed somebody to this blog and realized that the recipe is actually on my old blog. So I'm re-publishing it with slightly different scale.

The secret to this is very simple - simmering for a loooooonnnggggggg time. There's nothing else to it. I used pre-packaged massaman curry paste, added a lot of other chopped spices and peanuts and then cooked it for about 6 hours. Massaman curry is a little different from all other Thai curries. It requires some dry spices (cinnamon and bay leaves) as opposed to just fresh spices. Massaman is not exactly a Thai word either. I think it came from Muslim-man telling the origin of the recipe.

Regardless, it's a wonderful and hearty dish to serve in a cold weather.



Ingredients

• 5 pounds of any flavorful cut of beef - cubed (I used sirloin tips because they were on sale - but chucks would be fine too.)


• 3 pounds of potatoes - peeled and quartered and then soaked in cold water so that they don't turn brown


• 1/2 cup of ginger - peeled - chopped


• 1 head garlic - peeled and chopped *


• 15 shallots - peeled - chop 5 and leave the rest whole *


• 3 stalks of lemongrass - discard outer layers and both tips and chopped *


• 2 tablespoons of galangal - chopped *


• 2 cinnamon sticks


• 5 bay leaves


• 1 cup of massaman curry paste


• 2 cans coconut milk


• 1/2 cup chopped peanuts


• 2 tablespoon red pepper flakes


• 1 cup tamarind juice (I soaked about half a cup of packaged tamarind in a cup of water. This makes the curry a little tangy.)


• 1 tablespoon cooking oil


• 2 tablespoon brown sugar


• Fish sauce - to taste

Directions

1. Marinate the beef in a can of coconut milk, 1/4 cup of chopped ginger and about 2 tablespoons of fish sauce for 30 minutes.


2. Cook the marinated meat on medium heat for 45 minutes. Stir occasionally.


3. In a different pot - preferably the larger one, fry massaman curry paste with the rest of chopped spices in oil for 1 minute. Stir vigorously and try not to burn the curry. Add a can of coconut milk. Reduce the heat to medium.


4. Combine meat into the curry pot. Once the content is a little bubble, reduce heat to very low. Add potatoes, whole shallots, peanuts, bay leaves and cinnamon sticks. Season to taste with sugar, red pepper flakes, tamarind juice and fish sauce.


5. Let simmer for a few hours or until the meat is tender.

* I processed all the spices other than ginger together in my food processor. It saved me a lot of time and tears.

Butternut Squash Beef Stew with Red Wine

This is my first time cooking butternut squash. I bought it on a whim from the farmer's market. I actually didn't know what to do with it. I googled for butternut squash recipes and found a lot of them - soups, stews, crisps, pies, etc. I was tempted to make this better than pumpkin pie. But I don't want "pumpkin pie" I want to taste butternut squash. So I decided to make stew. I want to eat meat. I got the idea from Epicurious.com's Braised Meat with Butternut Squash but I didn't exactly follow the recipe.



Ingredients

• 1 1/2 pounds beef chuck - cut into cubes


• 1 tablespoon all purpose flour


• 1 tablespoon olive oil


• 2 medium onions - chopped


• 3-4 cups of water


• 1 butternut squash, peeled - seeded and cut into cubes


• 1 cup red wine


• A few bay leaves


• A pinch of crushed dry red pepper


• Salt and pepper

Directions

1. Coat the beef in all purpose flour. Heat oil in a large stock pot. When the oil is hot, sear the beef. When all the sides are brown, add chopped onions. Stir occasionally.


2. When the onions become translucent, add water, red wine, the squash and bay leaves. Let cook until boiled. Reduce heat to simmer. Season with dry red pepper, salt and black pepper.


3. Let simmer until the beef is tender - about an hour or more. Serve 4 - 6 servings.

The stew came out very nice and full of tastes. I think I was a little heavy handed with the red pepper so the stew was hotter than necessary. The sweetness from butternut squash blended nicely with red wine's sharpness. I might want to put celery in the stew the next time I make it because I got really soft texture from the stew and then the beef... There's no other texture in the middle. Celery might help with that.

Yum-Neur (Thai Beef Salad)

London Broil cut was on sale. Buy one package and get one free! So I bought about 3 pounds of the meat. Ate the first half and froze the rest. Sorry meat. I didn't know when I would cook again....

Five days later... I used it for a beef salad.

This is a variation of Labb recipe. Instead of ground meat, I used pan-cooked beef - sliced thinly. I also wanted to use peppermint in the salad but couldn't find any in the supermarket in the neighborhood. So exactly the same ingredients as Labb will do.



I ate this over iceberg lettuce -- no rice!!! I was feeling very healthy.