Meat!

I really hate the Thai Kitchen brand of curries. They are everywhere, and not tasty. Better, and usually findable at stores like 99 Ranch, is Maesri curry, the only one I have ever found to make an acceptable Massamun curry.

But over the summer I had this truly transcendant green curry. I mean, like no green curry I've ever tasted. I think my aunt had slipped some cardamom into her mix. There is good canned curry, which will get you better Thai curry than you'll usually get at a restaurant if you do it right. But to have a religious experience with curry you have to make your own.

I went looking for recipes and to my surprise Epicurious had one that didn't look too bad. (I always thought of them as a little white.) So compiled from several different sources, I put together recipes for red and green curries.

Red curry: from epicurious, recipezaar, and temple of thai.

20 dried chilies
4 tsp coriander
2 stalks lemongrass
1 tsp peppercorns
4 tsp galangal
2 tsp chopped kaffir lime leaves or grated lime rind
2 tbsp coriander root or cilantro stems
6 tbsp chopped shallots
1/4 cup chopped garlic
15-20 red fresh chilis
2 tsp gapi (shrimp paste)
salt or fish sauce.

green curry: from bbc recipes and syvum.com

30 green chilis
2 tsp whole peppercorns (white would be good, I had black)
2 tsp cumin
2 tsp coriander
2 tsp cardamom <-- not in any of the recipes online but I suspected it was in my aunt's
2 tbsp coriander
1 cup shallots
2 tbsp garlic
2 tbsp coriander root or cilantro stems
1 tbsp galangal
about the same amount, maybe a little less of ginger
2 tbsp (about one stalk) lemongrass
1 tbsp shrimp paste
1 tbsp fish sauce
2 tsp lime rind or kaffir lime leaves

It's pretty straightforward, but time-consuming. For the dry spices you want to get them whole and toast them in a pan. For the rest, chop it up real good. Then grind it all in small batches in a mortar and pestle. Or, if you're less dumb than me, use a food processor, but then you may have to add a bit of liquid.

I didn't find shrimp paste at 99 ranch, probably not because they didn't have it but because it's sometimes hard to find something in all the abundance. But I did have dried shrimp, so I rehydrated them and crushed them with some fish sauce. I kept all that separate from the rest because I have a vegetarian roommate, so I froze that separately in individual doses, to be added to curries she's not eating.

The spices used in each curry are pretty similar, but the ratios are different, which I think may be just a peculiarity of my recipe sources. I actually liked the green curry quite a bit better... I don't like having too much spice relative to the other flavors. Don't get me wrong, I like my curry spicy, but I want those other flavors too. If I want spicy I can use a lot rather than a little curry... I'm not going for spice efficiency here. So next time when I do the red curry I'll probably use a spice ratio similar to what I used for the green.

And here's what I made:

gaeng khiew wan poo (green curry crab... yum!)
4 soft shell crabs
a bunch of thai eggplants. like, maybe 6 or so. if you can't get those, then try to find some of those cute round ones at the hippy grocery store, or the japanese eggplants. The big dark purple ones are a last resort.
some chopped onion.
maybe some baby corn, though i didn't use it this time.

green curry
coconut milk

start by deep frying the crabs. They react violently with the hot oil. watch out.

set the crabs aside and sautée the onions in sesame oil. then toss in the eggplant, cut into bite-sized pieces. cut each of the crabs in half and throw those in . stir in a heaping tablespoon of green curry.
then a splash of coconut milk, but not much. like 1/4 of a can or less. This is not a soupy curry, it should be thick and mostly clinging to the food chunks. and a nice, dark, green-brown.

Soft-shell crab is expensive true, so this recipe would really work nicely with most any seafood. Green curry is particularly tasty with seafood (whereas I think red goes better with land based meat).