👨‍🍳 Cooking in the Time of COVID 👨‍🍳

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Spotted some basa at the supermarket yesterday and since that type of catfish is native to Southeast Asia, I thought I’d do something Thai with it, perhaps a green curry. Now, there are two ways to make a Thai curry: the right way (read, “labor-intensive”) or the best I can muster during pandemic times (read, “intensely lazy”).

When I cleave to an orthodox strategy, my recipe calls for grating fresh galangal and ginger, chopping lemongrass, garlic, shallots and cilantro, plus Thai bird chilies, makrut lime leaves, lime juice, fish sauce, palm sugar, coconut milk and then some. But lately, I don’t have the energy to even read that recipe let alone make the stuff, hence “intensely lazy” would be the order of the day.

At the market, I remembered that I had some Thai green curry paste in the freezer, so I bought the basa along with an eggplant, a can of baby corn and coconut milk and hoped for the best.

Returning to my kitchen, I heated up the coconut milk and the curry paste. But hoping for the best did not make it so. I considered what components I already had that would fix it – because it definitely needed fixing. The spice level needed to be kicked up and there was a jar of Thai Chili Paste with Holy Basil on the shelf so I added some of that, it needed to be more herbaceous so I added some cilantro and Blasphemous Basil that I had on hand, it needed salty pungency so I added fish sauce and then it needed sweetness so I added palm sugar and then it needed acid so I added lime juice. There was a jar of Thai pickled green peppercorns in the fridge from the last time (when I did it right) and a few mushrooms, so I tossed those in along with the fish and the veggies.

I tasted it. Not bad. Not bad at all.

And as I review what I’ve just written, I recognize that I had actually been halfway along the road to doing it the right way, but since my decisively committed strategy was “intensely lazy” I stopped where I stopped: far be it from me to flout a previously endorsed plan.

Moral: There’s something to be said for quitting while you’re ahead.
 
 
Stay safe, be well, and eat whatever it takes. ❤️