Green Chicken & Shiitake Mushroom Curry

I was just watching Julie & Julia, a great lazy saturday afternoon movie about a woman who sets herself the task of making every recipe in Juila Childs recipe book The Art of French Cooking in one year and about Julia Child living in France in 1949.  It's delightful. And has made me think I might need to buy this book and scrap my diet and start making outrageously delicious French food. Actually, I bet alot of the recipes are pretty 'paleo' - processed-crap-free.  The French know where it's at for good, wholesome food.  You'd never see some Frenchie passing up butter for margarine. Erk. Margarine, even the word makes a greasy, plasticy feel in my mouth.

Anyhoo, the recipe.

Green Chicken Curry

Ingredients:
2 spring onions
3 cloves garlic
2 red chili's
6 medium sized shiitake mushrooms (or button mushrooms)
1 carrot
1 courgette
1 cup frozen peas
3 FR chicken breasts
1 Tbs sesame oil
Splash of shoyu (soy sauce)
1 tin coconut cream
Juice of 2 limes
pinch of stock
Green Curry paste!!

This is a good meal to experiment with eating shiitake mushrooms, if you haven't had them before.  You buy them dried from the Asian supermarket, and when you want to eat them you soak them in boiling water for about 5 minutes, the longer the better though.  Then you take them from the water and squeeze the water out of them, chop off their stalks, and thinly slice them.
Shiitake mushrooms are very meaty in taste and texture and really add something to a meal.

Method:
Soak your shiitake. They are very buoyant and float, so you put them in a bowl with the water, and then put a smaller bowl on top. Genius.
Slice the spring onion and start to fry in sesame oil, garlic next, then chili, as it starts to dry out splash in a leetle shoyu.  Chop your chicken up and add that to the pan to cook, plus the juice of one lime.
Squeeze out the shiitake, slice thinly, into the pan. Give the chicken some alone time in the pan with the mushrooms, so the flavours combine, and when pretty much cooked, add courgette, carrot and very last, peas.
Stir and make sure it is all pretty nicely cooked, then crack open and add your coconut cream.
I use a whole tin, which makes it really soupy, which I like.  I think I should probably drain off the excess if I intend to parade around in a bikini this summer but.... coconut creeeeeeam!
Add about 1 heaped teaspoon of green curry paste and the juice of one more lime and sprinkle in a pinch of stock. I am liking to use stock in place of salt sometimes, because it is salty, but has more body.
Let it simmer a little bit, then serve. Coriander would be nice on top too if you have it.


I know using pre-made curry paste seems a bit like cheating, but you just can't make your own that easily, you would need a diverse range of fresh herbs.

And this green curry paste (I can't get the picture the right way up but doesn't matter because none of the words on it are English), is my hot little curry paste tip.  You can find it at Asian supermarkets, and the ingredients is just herbs.  No sugar, no MSG, no preservatives, just herbs. And it tastes great. They have lot's of different kinds, but as the writing on the front is not in English, you have to just try them out to find out what type of curry they make.  Hee.

How high maintenance is it? 4/10
Only gets a four because of the shiitake, which may be foreign to you. But aren't foreign things a little bit exciting.

Is it worth it? Yup.

Nutritional Benefits:
Shiitake, and the other Japanese mushrooms, are actually medicinal, as opposed to just being nutritional, which means they have therapeutic benefit.  As well as lots of enzymes and vitamins (folate, calcium, magnesium, selenium), they contain polysaccharides that stimulate immunity and are anti-viral and anti-bacterial.  They have been used to treat cancer. Put's a new spin on the words 'magic mushrooms'...

I like to think of them as the 'meat vegetable' - because they are so meaty.  They are very sustaining. And high protein, for a vegetable.

You can keep the water that you soak them in, and add it back into food, as this will contain lots of the vitamins.  It makes good stock.

Happy tummy, happy life.

Here is a pic of the chocolate cake in process that my flatmate was making on the bench next to me.  It is 50% white sugar. OUCH!  :)