Green curry

I'm not a spicy food eater. Some people love to eat spicy food. They like hot sauces, they order things as "extra-spicy". I am not one of those people. I used to have someone who cooked for me a lot who put spicy in everything. He sucked.

For some reason, I discovered a few years ago that Josh is one of these spicy-loving people. The great thing is that he knows I am not good with spice so he tends to spicy up his food and leave me to my wussy non-spiciness. We've been working on my spice tolerance for years now so that I will eat things that are pretty spicy if the flavor is good. Sometimes the flavor is so good, that you are practically crying at the heat.

For the sake of my own pride, I would like to mention that the only spicy I did grow up with is my father's pepper sauce which is made of Sichuan peppercorns, black peppercorns, garlic, soy sauce, and oil. So I can eat this stuff with no problem where sometimes even spicy-lovers are like, woah. Of course, the spicy-level depends on the batch.

Anyway. I've come to love the curries. Thai curries, Indian curries. I will admit I'm still pretty wussy! We started eating green curry recently and it's spicy, but it's good! Still don't really eat the red curry.

I recently got Madhur Jaffrey's new book about cooking Indian at home. As I was reading through it, I noticed a green curry recipe that seemed pretty straightforward and I said, I can do that... I think. Years ago, we would make curry from a can and while it was always easy, it was sooooo spicy. But Josh likes the spicy and I figured I could control it anyway.

It all starts off with making this sauce: water, garlic, ginger, more cilantro than you think you could possibly need, jalapeno, tumeric, salt. It was the cilantro that controlled the amount of sauce I made because the full recipe called for 3.5 oz and I had 2.1. The recipe actually calls for Thai birds eye chiles, but all I had was jalapenos, so I chopped one up and threw it in whole, seeds, ribs, and all. Now, this is a big deal for me, because you know I don't like the spicy, but I figured one little whole jalapeno! Now how bad could that be?

Then you fry up some chopped onion, saute the lamb pieces, and top it with the sauce. Since it goes into the oven, I used my cast iron. At this point, the kitchen spelled delightfully green and a little bit spicy.

The dish hangs out in the 325 degree oven for 60 min and then you check to see if the lamb was tender, and it was! It certainly looked drier than I expected and maybe a little burnt?

Based on my recipe proportions, I should have added 1/4 cup of coconut milk to this. But I added that and it looked too thick, too strong. So I added more. Then more. I think I added 1/2 the can which is closer to probably 3/4 cup of coconut milk. It was still thicker than most curries we have out, but maybe that is what curry is really supposed to be. It was tasty though and smooth, and still definitely felt rich. The curry infused itself into the lamb which was also tasty. That one jalapeno was pretty spicy! Josh wanted more greenness in the form of cilantro next time so that maybe we didn't need so much coconut milk.

Definitely a good first run. Maybe there is a picture somewhere so I can see what the consistency should be.