Thai Green Curry Paste

"Do you know how to make Thai Green Curry?"

My mom asked me one fine day when we were having dinner.

"Maybe. Why?", I ventured carefully.

"Oh, why don't we make some one of these days?", she chirped happily.

Ever since then, green curry appears weekly on our table every week like clockwork.

In my research into the recipe for the curry paste, I flipped quite a few cookbooks and amazed that some of my cookbook hadn't bothered to include a recipe for it. Certainly not Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything (yellow edition). It led me to wonder if people do make curry paste still or that has gone the dodo way.

Making curry paste is certain easy if you avoid the true blue way of pounding with mortar and pestal. Just whizz the ingredients in a blender and you will have a raw paste in no time at all.

After that, it is just a matter of frying until you start choking and coughing and crawling your way out of the kitchen to know that the paste is ready. But do a visual check too. It should be a darker shade green than it first started.

This gives a wonderful platform for you to dump just about anything you fancy in it. I prefer to go with asparagus, tomatoes and beef combo. Anything goes, I guess. Almost anything goes.

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Thai Green Curry Paste

(makes 2/3 cup)

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1 tsp cumin seeds

1 tsp coriander seeds

1 fresh Thai chilli

1 lemongrass

4 large cloves of garlic

2/3 cup shallot

1 (1-inch) piece ginger

1 tsp salt

3/4 cup cilantro

1 tbsp lime juice

Whizz everything in a blender until finely chopped. Add cooking oil to aid the blending process, if necessary.