Easy Thai

Coconut Kitchen, the fabulous Thai restaurant/sauce producer, have added some new lines to their range. Last week, I sampled the new Easy Thai Red Curry paste. It was delicious. Smelt so amazing that I'd eaten it before I even thought about taking a photograph. So all I could put on twitter was:

Just tested a new Thai curry paste from @coconut1kitchen. If these clean bowls are anything to go by, it's going to be a hit! Appearing on our shelves at @tastesdeli soon! #easy #Thai #curry #happytummy #yum #foodie #deli #eton #coconutkitchen #redthaicurry
 

But that was enough to generate our first online sale, just 48 hours later. Before I'd even got the product onto our online shop!

I've now enjoyed a second bowl of delicious Thai Red Curry and paused long enough to photograph it. So simple to prepare, and fabulously tasty. This is my Chicken and Cashew Red Curry.

Toast some cashews in a large pan and set aside.
Into the warm pan add a splash of coconut oil, heat and seal two thinly sliced chicken breasts.
Add a jar of Coconut Kitchen Red Thai Curry Paste.
Half fill the jar with water and add that as well.
Stir in a tin of coconut milk and bring to a simmer.
Simmer until the chicken is cooked and the sauce thickened.
Stir in the reserved cashews.
Serve with rice.
Photograph, then eat!

Top 50 Foods AND Small Artisan Producer of the Year

In addition to the one star, two star and three star awards given out at the Great Taste Awards, the three star award winning products are also entered into further judging to determine the top 50 foods.

This year the list of th top 50 foods included
 Blaisdon Red Plum Jam from The Artisan Kitchen.
 Wild Rata Honey from Wedderspoon Organic.
 Easy Thai Green Curry Paste from coconut kitchen.

Also Sarah, who single handedly is The Artisan Kitchen, was voted Small Artisan Producer of the Year. Here she is beaming at the golden forks awards dinner! Fantastic achievements all round.

Thai Cooking with Coconut Kitchen

I've been testing out our new range from the wonderful Coconut Kitchen. A selection of sauces based on those used in the Coconut Kitchen restaurant in Abersoch, North Wales.

I started with the Wok fried Pad Thai Noodles recipe from the Pad Thai Sauce bottle. I didn't have any chicken or prawns so used a lot of vegetables (carrots, mushrooms, peppers, sugar snap peas, and sprouted chick peas instead of bean sprouts). I'm pretty sure the flavours would be better if I'd used something to absorb more of the sauce, rather than the al dente vegetables. I did toast the peanuts in the pan before frying the onions, so they were ready to garnish. That is my only tip here! This is the coconut kitchen recipe:

Ingredients, Serves 2:
Rice stick noodles (partly cooked in hot water), vegetable oil, 2 garlic cloves (crushed), 1 chicken breast or 16 king prawns, ½ onion (sliced), 50g  beansprouts, any other vegetables of choice (carrots,
mushrooms, sugar snap peas, broccoli or peppers are good), spring onion, coriander, lime wedges and crushed peanuts to garnish.

To cook:
Fry the garlic and onion in the oil and add the chicken or prawns and vegetables, cook for 2 minutes, add the partly cooked rice noodles. Then add 1 bottle of Coconut Kitchen Pad Thai Sauce, stir fry the noodles in the sauce until fully cooked. Add the beansprouts, serve and garnish with the spring onion, coriander, peanuts and lime.

I made some simple sweetcorn fritters as a starter, mainly because I wanted to try out the dipping sauce!

To make the fritters boil 2 sweetcorn cobs and slice off the kernels. Put half of the kernels along with 1 egg, 1 spring onion, 1 de-seeded red chilli (or more if you like the heat), 30g plain flour (white or wholemeal), and half a teaspoon of baking powder into a blender and puree until fairly smooth. Small lumps are fine. Stir in the rest of the sweetcorn. Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a large pan and spoon in the batter. I use about 1 tablespoon per fritter. Fry until browned (about 1 minute), flip over and brown the other side. I served them with Coconut Kitchen Sweet Chilli & Garlic Sauce  and chopped avocado and was really pleased with them.

With the abundance of vegetables I used, we had a lot of Pad Thai left over, certainly enough for another two meals. I used the left overs as an accompaniment to baked salmon. The rice noodles didn't really survive the reheat, but the flavour from the Pad Thai was still delicious, possibly better than it had been the night before. Of course, I marinated the salmon in Coconut Kitchen Chilli & Garlic Sauce. And that was wonderful! The chilli sauce is divine. Just the same as you find in good Thai restaurants with the right level of sweetness, and other flavours complimenting the chilli - not just hot and sweet like some can be.

I've been sneaking it into a lot of things. Like the avocado salsa I made to go with some sweetcorn muffins (using up both the half avocado I had left from the weekend's starter and more of the glut of fresh sweetcorn).