Are you Curry-ous?

Thai Cooking 101: Make a paste. The curry paste is the base for most Thai dishes and I'm going to master it before I leave this place. I visited my former colleague and good friend, Phawana at her new Korean fusion restaurant to get advice and a basic lesson. She taught me how to say the basic ingredients, how much to use, and how to turn the paste into a dinner.

Basic ingredients left to right: shrimp paste, red onion or shallots, ginger or galangal, dried red chillies, garlic, green peppercorns, lemon grass, kafir lime leaves. Mortar and pestle in the middle.

The next day, I went to the market to purchase all the ingredients and a mortar and pestle. I'm doing this old-school. I put all the stuff in the bowl and began pounding away. And pounding. Until I was covered in sweat and my arm ached.

But there was paste. My first effort looked like a cross between cat food and cat throw up, but didn't taste too bad. Need more lemon grass and chilis, less shrimp paste and garlic.

I'll keep you pasted---er, I mean posted--on the progress.