How to Feature Summer Veggies: Thai green curry

This is delicious on its own as a stew, or served over rice. I used whatever veggies were on hand... you could certainly use almost any of the late-summer bounty that starts to overwhelm around this time of year. This was a great way to use up some beans, peppers, and Thai basil from my mother-in-law's garden! Also it's vegan.

I love how dust & light-leak filters can make a bad image look merely "bad."

Ingredients

• 1 t coconut oil
• 1 yellow onion, chopped
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 1 cup water
• 3 yellow potatoes, cubed
• 1 carrot, cubed
• 2 t (more or less) Thai green curry paste
• 1 can full-fat coconut milk
• 1 bell pepper, chopped up
• Any number of green or yellow beans, chopped
• 1 t Shoyu or soy sauce
• 2-3 small bunches of bok choi, washed & sliced
• 1 medium tomato, chopped
• Thai (or regular) basil

Directions

1. Melt coconut oil in Dutch oven, sauté onion. When it starts to turn glassy, add garlic and sauté.
2. Add one cup of water plus potatoes and carrot, bring to a simmer.
3. Stir in Thai green curry paste. Simmer for ~8 minutes until the potatoes start to be a little soft.
4. Add coconut milk, bell pepper, and beans. Continue to simmer about 5 minutes more.
5. Add shoyu. More water can be added at any time if more liquid is needed.
6. Once vegetables are mostly cooked (espeically the potatoes), add the bok choi, tomato, and basil. Cook for only a few minutes more.
7. I refrigerated this overnight and it may have helped flavors marry more. This was an extremely popular potluck dish. Reheat and serve... with rice if you wish!

What's your favorite way of featuring summer veg?

Coffee Talk

Do you like coffee? I love it. Not like I love chocolate cake or a lovely massage. I love it like I love... oxygen. Always there and very much appreciated. When it's not there, I am sad.

On a recent morning, like every morning, I turned to our Black & Decker coffee maker, which I think of as the Will & Kate coffee maker because I bought it around the time when Prince William married the Duchess of Cambridge. I loaded it up with freshly ground coffee and filtered water, as always, pressed the ON button, as always, and walked away. It started to do its usual huffing and puffing, but after 5 minutes... no coffee. It was making its usual steam, but nothing was dripping out into the carafe. I tried various tricks like: turning it off and on again, replacing the water, jimmying the carafe, rinsing the brewing chamber. Nothing!

 

Pick the lame-o in this mechanical lineup.

My reaction was as follows: I got a stool and dug around in high cupboards until I found our French press. Then I made coffee that way. Once properly caffeinated, I wrote a haiku about the broken coffeemaker and posted it on Twitter.

Then I avoided dealing with it by taking a week's vacation. Upon my return though, it was clearly time to buy a new coffee maker. (The French press only makes one cup at a time, and we need about 4 cups to get started in the morning.)

So. At the local hardware store I contemplated the selection. What was annoying to me about the broken machine is that I still don't know what was actually wrong with it. It just mysteriously stopped working. Why spend money on something that will One Day betray me? The first coffee maker cost about $30, and so would the next one, and the next, and then I'd have spent hundreds of dollars on crappy coffee makers. Why not buy a great coffee maker that I could understand inside and out? Why not spend a little more now but be able to use the thing for years and years?

That's how I came home with a Chemex.

It's pretty classic. Groovy 70s vibe. Glass vessel, thick paper filter, hot water, that's all you need. No buttons, no inner workings, no cheap plastic bits.

It does take more time than pressing a button... because the hot water must be poured over the ground coffee by hand. But I'm thinking of it as Zen attention to the present, so that's a good thing.

Which item was invented in 1941?

What do you think of the Chemex... as a beautiful object or a daily item? Personally I really liked the Black & Decker coffee, but this stuff is Pretty Good.