Shortcuts for cooking a curry dish

The easiest way to make a coconut curry dish is to buy ready made chilli paste for curry. That will eliminate the process of pounding chillies with the many other ingredients that will make the curry flavourful. However, check the packaging to see that it has cooking instruction for making the curry dish. I used to get my homemade chillie paste from my aunt.

Whenever I am not sure about how to use a ready made sauce or paste at the sundry shop I usually go to, I will check with the store owner. If the store owner cannot help me, I can check out the brand online. When I shopped online at TESCO before it became Lotus, I noticed that they usually include the cooking instruction for the paste I am interested in, which they had extracted from the packaging itself. 

Once you are able to find the chillie paste you like, all you need to add to it is the curry powder for meat or fish, based on what you are cooking, and santan (coconut milk). This is the curry powder I use for cooking fish curry.  It is from my cousin's factory in Melaka.

You can also add to your curry dish any of the following ingredients:

-potato (our family’s favourite choice)

-lady’s finger

-long beans

-cabbage

-tomato

For the santan, I prefer to buy the packet version.  It can keep longer so that I can cook my curry dish anytime I want to as long as I have curry powder and chillie paste in the fridge.

Recently, I discovered an even easier way to make curry. These are the ingredients noted on the packaging:

As you can see from the list, coconut milk is already included in the paste. This is how you can use the curry paste to cook chicken curry.

This is how the Brahim’s chicken curry sauce should look like after it is cooked but I prefer it with more sauce. So, I usually add extra water or santan to the pot. If it is not salty enough, instead of salt, I add soya sauce.

However, I prefer to eat their MRE (meal ready to eat) version which is even easier to prepare. I just put the packet into a pot of boiling water and wait for 3 minutes. I am drawn to this brand because I found out that their rice and dishes are served to airlines passengers too.

I usually serve it in a glass bowl so that if there are any leftovers, I can keep it covered in the fridge. As my glass bowl is microwave safe, the following day, I can just pop it in the microwave oven to heat up for about 2 to 3 minutes. 

As I am not an adventurous eater aka fussy, whenever my family travel overseas for a holiday I usually bring along a mini cooker, instant noodles and some of Brahim’s MREs. I also bring along metal containers to store the food heated up to eat. They are great for days when we do not feel like eating the local food over there or when we have hunger pangs because of the time difference.

MREs with curry or chilli sauce were the best dishes we travelled overseas with as we could also eat it with bread which we could easily pinched from the buffet spread of the hotels we stayed at. 

If you cannot buy ready made curry paste, this is how you can make your own.

Once your curry paste is ready, you can start cooking your curry dish. I prefer to use chicken and potato in the dish. *Note that you only need 2 stalks of lemongrass cut in half. The white portion for making the curry paste while the green portion is for cooking the curry. However, if you are able to buy the curry paste, you can omit adding it to cook this curry dish.

I found this recipe from The Burning Kitchen. Check it out. The mother and daughter team, Bee Leng and Melissa, provides lots of photos and tips which you will find useful.

Cooking with frozen ingredients

I usually cook frozen food, meat or fish without defrosting them. It is because I can defrost and cook the frozen ingredients at the same time by steaming it over the soup I am boiling for the day.

I can put my frozen ingredients for soup, directly into the pot of water to boil. I do that for frozen chicken feet I used to enhance the flavour of the soup.

However, I prefer to place the frozen soup bone, pork or chicken in a round metal container and steam it over the soup. You can see from this photo that while I am boiling my soup, I can also steam enough rice for the day and frozen dumplings (dimsum). From my experience, I know that some soups can affect the flavour of the dishes I am steaming up. So I do not do that if I am boiling herbal soup or Lotus root soup.

I steam the meat till it is no longer red with blood before putting it in the soup to boil till tender. I then sieve the liquid in the metal container into the pot of soup to remove the scums. This is how the meat should look like before I put it in the soup.

It is easier for me to remove the scum from the meat in the metal bowl then while it is boiling in the soup.

If I plan on using my airfryer to cook a pork or chicken dish, I will marinate the ingredients first in a round metal container before storing it in the freezer. When it is time to cook it, I will remove the cover and pop the metal container in the airfryer to cook for about 10 to 15 minutes on one side and turn the meat over to cook for another 10 to 15 minutes. I then pour it into a pot, add about half a cup of water to boil it over low fire till the meat is tender enough. After tasting it, I can then decide if I need to add salt or soya sauce or oyster sauce to the dish.

My favourite dishes to cook this way are Oyster Sauce Chicken and Ayam Percik. You can see how I am supposed to cook the Ayam Percik from its packaging.

This is how I cook my Ayam Percik dish with frozen chicken.

I noticed that I am able to speed up the cooking process by not thawing the frozen ingredients I used.