Thai-Inspired Turkey Curry

Curries made with coconut milk and spicy Asian curry pastes are one of my favorite quick, real foods. Sometimes they are made with only some onion and lots of meat, but I always try to add as many vegetables as I can.

Served over rice or rice noodles, they are a great one-dish dinner that is light-years away from hamburger helper-type skillet meals.

I always start with coconut milk and turkey (or chicken), onion, and garlic and then add the curry paste. In the past I've used red and green, and this time I'm using yellow.

The vegetables I'm using today are carrots, chopped parsnips, and some frozen green beans from last year's garden. But since there are so many vegetables that are good in this like broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, and zucchini, it is a super flexible recipe to use whatever you've got on hand.

Oh, I forgot to put this in the ingredients picture, but I always add a splash of fish sauce, too. Some people just can't get past the smell, but I think it adds that Thai flavor I'm looking for.

Heat some olive oil or coconut oil in a large skillet, and add the onion, carrot, garlic, and any other fresh vegetable that would need sauteing - in this case, parsnips - and cook for about 4-5 minutes over medium heat.

Then add any remaining vegetables ( like the frozen beans I'm using) and the chopped, cooked meat. Oh, man, shrimp is really good, too.

Have you gotten the idea yet that it's easy to customize this to your taste and to what's in your pantry?

Broccoli, zucchini, and peppers would be added here, if I were using them. The point is to have the vegetables remain crisp and not over-cook them.

Then pour in the coconut milk and a splash of fish sauce. For the amount of meat and vegetables I'm using, I added two cans of coconut milk.

Now comes the tricky part. Most of the flavor (and heat) of this dish comes from the curry paste. There are recipes on the web that have you make your own curry paste, but then it's not nearly so quick and easy, is it? And they are cheap at the Asian food store and last for months, so this is one convenience I'll keep, I think.

Anyway, the tricky part is getting the right amount of the spicy curry paste - enough to be flavorful, but not so much that it causes your mouth to burn, your eyes to water, and your forehead to sweat.

Don't ask me how I know this.

Here's what I've found out through trial and error: yellow curry paste is the mildest (and tastes more Indian than the other two), red is more spicy and green will blow your head off.

Gee, do you think I had a little issue with the green curry?

One of my sisters lived in Thailand for a few years and she found that they like to laugh at Americans lack of ability to eat spicy food. I think she worked up to more spicy things, but she said their idea of "mild" is our equivalent of smoke coming out of our ears.

So, in my world, I use a teaspoon of green curry paste to two cans of coconut milk, 1-2 teaspoons of red curry paste, and a little less than a tablespoon of yellow. But my main point here is to go slow, and taste after you've added a small amount. You can always put more in, but you can't take it out.

Again, please don't ask.

OK, there was a recipe here somewhere, wasn't there? Oh yeah, after adding the curry paste let everything cook together for about 5- 10 minutes to meld the flavors and cook the vegetables to crisp-tender.

Ladle over rice or rice noodles and enjoy, 'cause no one's gonna laugh at you here...

Thai-Inspired Turkey (or Chicken, or Shrimp) Curry

• 2 cans coconut milk
• 1-2 Tb. olive oil or coconut oil
• 4 cups chopped, cooked turkey or chicken (or shelled shrimp)
• 1 onion, chopped
• 3-4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 Tb. fish sauce
• yellow, red, or green spicy curry paste (1 tsp. to 1 Tb. according to taste)
• about 6 c. mixed vegetables of choice: sliced carrots, parsnips, or zucchini, chopped broccoli, cauliflower or sweet peppers, cut green beans, peas.
• rice or rice noodles for serving

1. Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the onion, garlic, and any hard vegetable that needs sauteing (carrots, parsnips, cauliflower). Saute for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.
2. Add the cooked meat (or cook the shrimp with the vegetables until done), and any other vegetables along with the coconut milk and fish sauce.
3. Add the curry paste to taste, being careful to monitor the spiciness. Start with only 1 tsp. of green, 1-1/2 tsp. of red or just less than a Tb. of yellow.
4. Cook for another 5 to 10 minutes to let the flavors meld and cook the vegetables to crisp-tender.
5. Serve over rice or rice noodles.

Makes 6 servings

-Jami

Living Room Makeover Continued: The Foot Stool

After doing the first part of the living room makeover, continuing onto the bookshelves, and bringing the entryway into the same scheme, it's time for the foot stool we use as a coffee table to receive a facelift.

Sometimes I'm seduced by magazines and catalogs that have wonderful, chunky wood coffee tables in front of couches. They look so cool, and some have shelves for storing books and things.

But then I'm watching TV with my kids and we all have our feet up on our footstool and we're all comfortable with no table edge grinding into our legs, and I'm reminded why we have a footstool for a coffee table.

But see this lovely toile? I am growing weary of seeing the dirt on the side facing the couch courtesy of said feet. And, like, how silly would it be to tell people not to put their feet up on a footstool?

I just have to face that the light colored toile was never the right choice for a foot stool.

Unless I want to wash it every week.

Not.

My husband and I actually made this foot stool/coffee table more than ten years ago using some Home Depot legs, a thick piece of plywood, foam and batting. This lovely green (screams 1980's, doesn't it? So it must be way more than 10...) was the first layer and I think some other floral design was slipped over before the latest toile cover.

I'm bringing some black touches to my color scheme of white and sage green and also some texture by adding natural burlap and linen. I already had a large piece of burlap from some other project and decided it would be perfect to cover the stool since it's just the color of dirt. :-)

And here is the stool, newly covered in the burlap, after pounding 100 black upholstery tacks all around the edge to hold it in place.

I'm ready for the cleaner look and like how it turned out, but I was not prepared for how long it took me to pound all those tacks in. Sheesh, it was not easy getting them all evenly spaced (and they're not, so don't look closely!), and it took more than two hours and a bruised, painful thumb to get to this point.

Which is not done. If you look at the corner of the stool at the right in the photo above, you can see that I ran out of tacks with only about three more to go.

The same 3 that I bent putting them in.

Always get more than you think you need. Though in my defense, I bought all the store had in the design I wanted.

The corners were the trickiest parts to fold just right, keeping the material tight and yet not so bulky that the tacks wouldn't hold.

Some corners look better than others, but I figure no one's going to be looking at all four corners at once, are they?

Just to remind you, here's a shot of the living room before the makeover (I should point out that it's just a mini-makeover...no major remodeling will be undertaken here!).

I'm definitely liking it, and the clean lines of stool has inspired me to store the magazines in a basket and not pile them on the stool anymore.

Our feet would usually knock them off, anyway.

Next up are new pillows for the two overstuffed green chairs. I'm thinking a vintage linen I have with some black transfer designs on them...

Make sure to check back to see how they turn out!

-Jami

This is linked to DIY Day at A Soft Place and Get Your Craft On.

Monday's Menu

The two new recipes I tried last week, Yellow Turkey Curry and Pulled Pork were both keepers. I've got the curry almost ready to post and will share my friend's super easy and tasty pulled pork recipe soon.

This week we have our annual snow trip to a nearby lake, so it's an easy week for menu planning. Love it when that happens.

Monday- Egg salad sandwiches, chips, carrots and broccoli (youth night)

Tuesday- Stir fry elk and broccoli (what do you think- will it work with the elk?), baked noodles

Wednesday- Cheesy-Crust Ham Pie, green salad

Thursday- Haystacks (beans and toppings on corn chips)

Friday- snow trip (or maybe "lake trip" since there may be very little snow!)

Saturday- at the lake (I'm bringing eggs, fruit, and cinnamon rolls for breakfast)

Sunday- On-your-own (sandwiches, etc.)

-Jami

Drugstore Deals

There were lots of good deals I could've bought at Rite Aid this week and I did plan on going back to use another $3 off $15 coupon but never had the time. I'm OK, though, with the deal I ended up with:

2 Kashi cereals, BOGO @ $4.99 -FREE Kashi cereal coupon from vocalpoint= 0

2 Sure deodorants, BOGO @ $2.99 -$1.50/1 (men) & $1/1 = .49

Acnomel acne treatment, $6.99 ($6 SCR)

Dentyne cup, $2.50 -$1.50/1 = $1

-$3/$15 RA coupon

=$5.48 (and since I'm getting the $6 SCR, I actually made .52 on this deal!)

Can I just say how much I love Rite Aid?

With Walgreens, however, it's more of a love-hate relationship. I really just go so I can use a Register Reward I got earlier that will expire (hate the expirations, by the way), not because there's some awesome deal. I spent $4.69 for these items and received a $4 RR.

While I was happy to get the Kleenex here, I have to tell you about the horrible customer service I got at the store. The four long boxes all rang up at the sale price, BOGO at $2.19 each, but the two little boxes beeped. The cashier apparently couldn't ring them through, even though the exact boxes were on the front page of the ad that was sitting there at her register.

So she calls somebody for a price check. Seriously. With the ad in front of her. No one comes. There's probably one other customer in the store somewhere, but really it was dead at this time and yet not one other Walgreens employee came.

Finally she looked at me and said, "I hate this," and goes to get the price check herself. I'm a little steamy at this point, but other than point out the ad, I didn't say anything as she finished ringing me up. I had a lot to do, and was already thinking of the next stop, and she did apologize for the wait.

But the total didn't sound right, so I checked my receipt out in the car (always check!) and realized she rang up both boxes without giving me the BOGO sale. So I run back in, thinking she could just fix it...wrong. She tells me I've got to go to the cosmetics counter and she'll call someone. Great.

I should mention, I still haven't seen another customer. So I stand at the other counter waiting for the manager for almost 5 minutes while she looks at me from her register. I kid you not. Then the manager comes, looks at my receipt, which was their fault, and says she needs to go get a box to give me the credit. So I wait again.

When I finally got the $2.19, she didn't even apologize for the wait or the problem in the beginning. It was like I was bothering her when she was busy doing other things.

Contrast this with what my husband experienced at Starbucks a couple days later. He order a coffee that was going to be brewed and then he sat down to do some work on a computer. He thought it was taking awhile, but didn't realize until they brought the coffee out to him with a profuse apology and a coupon for a free coffee that he had waited 4 minutes.

Ah...it's amazing how good customer service makes you feel about a place, isn't it?

What do you think? Did I just get a bad day, or is the customer always treated like this at Walgreens?

-Jami

Whole Grain Apple Butter Bars

For this installment of "Cookies in the Cottage" I bring you an easy bar cookie that has some good-for-you sounding ingredients but still taste like you're eating a cookie, plus they work as a really good granola bar, too, for snacks and lunches.

And no, they're not chocolate, but sometimes that's OK.

But only sometimes.

This bar cookie can be done in a variety of ways by changing the fruit in the middle. I've made them with strawberry, raspberry, blackberry and blueberry jams and they're equally good. But using my homemade thick and spicy apple butter is really one of my favorite ways to make these.

And in the spring when the rhubarb is coming on, I make a rhubarb filling for these that is so good people who don't like rhubarb will gladly eat them (read: my kids). I'll share that recipe, too, when the rhubarb is ready in a few months.

Here are the ingredients: oats, white whole wheat (or whole wheat pastry) flour, brown sugar (I'm using sucanat here for the first time), salt, baking soda, cinnamon, butter, and a cup of apple butter (or your favorite jam).

Nuts are purely optional, but usually add them as I really like them in cookies. Here I'm using chopped pecans.

Lightly butter a square baking pan, either 8x8 or 9x9 like I'm using here.

(*Ahem*...moving away from the natural light to the mixer area)

Add all the ingredients except the butter and apple butter/jam to a mixing bowl and stir to combine.

Then mix in the butter until thoroughly combined and all the butter pieces are incorporated.

(Ta-da- back over by the window...)

Press half of the crumb mixture (about 2-1/2 cups) onto the bottom of the prepared pan.

Pour the whole cup of apple butter (or jam) onto the unbaked crust and spread evenly.

Sprinkle the remaining crumbs over the top, covering completely and pressing down lightly.

Bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes or until the edges are lightly browned. Cool completely before cutting into bars.

Being so easy, these would make a great homemade substitute for all those "fruity" (I use the word loosely here) granola bars sold in the stores. You can wrap them individually and even freeze them. If you put them in the kid's lunches in the morning, they will be thawed by the time lunch rolls around.

And you will know every good ingredient in them.

Whole Grain Apple Butter Bars

• 2 c. rolled oats
• 1 c. white whole wheat flour (sometimes sold as "pastry flour")
• 3/4 c. brown sugar or sucanat (which worked great in this recipe)
• 1/4 t. salt
• 1/4 t. baking soda
• 1/2 t. cinnamon
• 3/4 c. butter
• 1/4-1/2 c. chopped nuts (optional)
• 1 c. apple butter (or other type of jam)

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly butter a 8 or 9-inch square pan.
2. In a large mixing bowl, combine oats, flour, sugar, salt, soda, cinnamon, and nuts, if using. Cut in the butter using a pastry cutter or electric mixer until thoroughly combined.
3. Press half of the mixture (about 2-1/2 cups) into the bottom of the prepared pan. Spread the apple butter evenly over the top and then sprinkle the remaining crumb mixture over the apple butter, pressing down gently.
4. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes until lightly browned.
5. Cool in pan on a wire rack before cutting into 16 bars (or 12 bars for "granola bar" sizes).

Makes 12-16 bars.

-Jami

This is linked to Ultimate Recipe Swap where you can find other recipes that use flour and the Grocery Cart Challenge Recipe Swap.