A couple months ago I took a demonstration-style Thai cooking class with some friends.  I learned a lot and brought home recipes for my favorite Thai dishes.  I didn’t waste a minute and decided to jump right into curry (wow… I wish I literally jumped into curry…that would be awesome…).  Well I did some things wrong and, to be honest, it tasted terrible.  Totally inedible.  Mike patted me on the back and gave me a “good effort” and then went for a box of mac n’ cheese.  Can’t blame the guy, really.  It was awful.  I wasn’t ready to give up, though.  It seemed like it should be manageable at home and I thought I knew what I did wrong.

Fast forward… Last week I had a chat with some of my twitter buddies about the delicious combination of apples and onions.  It is one of my favorite flavor combos — apples have a great sweetness that compliments the sweetness of a nicely sauteed or caramelized onion, but the sweetness is delicate enough that it goes well in a savory dish.  Love it love it love it.  Anyway… I told a friend about it and he seemed to doubt that the combo made sense.  But then he spotted a recipe for an apple and caramelized onion tart.  Another twitter buddy was twitter-eavesdropping (a behavior that is not only acceptable but encouraged on twitter) and said that she had this lovely — that was her word and I think it applies — lovely chicken curry with apples and onions.  She sent me the recipe and Friend #1 encouraged me to try it out and report back.  That’s precisely what I’m doing here.

I decided to try to make a more authentic (although still not quite) yellow curry with chicken, apples, and onions.  I found a recipe for yellow curry paste and was ready to make it my bitch.  I changed it up just slightly to make it work for me.  Obviously.

Yellow Curry Paste

• 1 tsp Cumin seeds
• 1 tsp Coriander seeds
• 1/2 tsp Ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp Salt
• 1 tbsp Chopped lemon grass
• 2 tbsp Chopped shallots
• 3 cloves garlic chopped
• 1 tbsp Yellow curry powder
• Can of coconut milk (NOT lite… I’ll get to this)

Toast the cumin seeds and coriander seeds in a dry pan until they’re fragrant.  It should only take about 3 minutes.  Grind them in a spice mill (I use my coffee grinder — same diff). If you don’t have a spice mill, use already ground spices.  Toasting the whole seeds does make it better, though. Chop the lemon grass, shallots, and garlic.  Put all of the ingredients except the coconut milk into some sort of awesome mixer — don’t use your big food processor.  It won’t grind it up fine enough. There is nothing pleasant about crunching a huge piece of lemon grass or biting down on a whole cumin seed. A really good blender or a small food processor would work.  My immersion blender came with an attachment that worked great for this.  One of the reasons that my first curry so awful was that the paste wasn’t ground up well enough.  It really needs to become a paste.  To move this process along, I added just a little bit of coconut milk to the mixture.  That helped immensely.

For the rest of the dish…

Yellow Chicken Curry with Apples and Onions

• Yellow curry paste
• the rest of can of coconut milk
• 2 chicken breasts
• 1 diced apple (I used Golden Delicious)
• 1 chopped red onion
• 1-2 hot chilies
• Salt & pepper

Dice the apple and chop the onion.  Put the chopped onion into a hot pan with some oil to saute.  Once they start to cook, add the apples.  Let them cook just until the onions are cooked through.  You don’t want the apples to get mushy.  Remove them from the pan.

Cut the chicken into small pieces and season with a little salt and pepper.  Add some oil to a hot pan.  Add the chicken and cook through.  Once it is done, remove it from the pan.

While the pan is still hot, add the curry paste.  Just let it cook for about one minute.  Then add about half of the can of coconut milk. Don’t add too much; you don’t want to drown your curry paste.  If the curry flavor is too strong in the end, you can always add more.

The second thing that ruined my first curry was lite coconut milk.  This stuff is useless, folks.  I’m not kidding.  It looks like coconut milk, it is almost as creamy as coconut milk, and it tastes like water.  Literally.  Don’t bother.  If you don’t want to use coconut milk, either use regular milk or don’t make this dish.

Stir the paste into the coconut milk.  Slice the chilies down the middle stopping at the stem so it is still attached.  Add them to the curry mixture to infuse with a little heat.  Add the chicken, apples and onions.  Let it simmer for just a couple minutes to get all nice and incorporated.

Serve over rice or noodles.

Yall, this was terrific!  I’m not kidding!  The curry paste turned out GREAT!  And the apples added something that you wouldn’t expect.  The flavor of the apples and the curry went great together — think curry chicken salad but with coconut milk instead of mayo and a deeper curry flavor.  It really wasn’t very hard if you follow my simple rules: 1) Make sure your paste is ground up very very well and 2) Do not even LOOK at a can of lite coconut milk.

If you decide to try this, please let me know what you think!  And thank you to my twitter buddies for encouraging me to give this a try… it was definitely worth it!