I've eaten loads of Thai green curry over the last few years. It's the staple veggie option on many a menu up and down the country. I've also had it in Laos and in Malaysia. The Thai ones were generally better. I've had a look at the list of ingredients on several jars of ready made curry paste and noticed that they generally contain fish sauce and dried shrimp. That's a bit worrying. I can't help wondering if people have been sneaking me fish sauce and shrimps while claiming their curry is vegetarian. Maybe not though. Usually people in Thailand get the idea pretty quickly when I explain the veggie thing. It's a Buddhist county after all. I also have a little sticker in my notebook that says 'I am vegetarian and don 't eat any meat or fish or even fish sauce'. I reckon most of the green curries I've had were really veggie.
Perhaps the best one I had (but this is difficult to say for sure, as I've tried a lot of good ones) was in a river-side restaurant in Nong Khai in the north east of Thailand. I stopped there on the way to Laos. The town is on the Thai-Lao border, which follows the line of the Mae Kong River in that corner of the country. Nong Khai is a cool place to hang out for a few days: friendly people, a relaxed pace of life and some good stuff to see round about (have a look at my photos of the Buddha sculpture park). If you are heading that way, I'd recommend spending time there rather than in Vientiane if you plan to rest for a while round about the border.
Anyway, this wee river-side restaurant was great. You could sit in the garden and look over to Laos, or watch people walking their dogs and cycling on the riverside path, while you enjoyed a cool beer or a lemon shake. You can hire bikes there and cycle the path yourself, but we never seemed to get round to it. The staff were never in any hurry to see us leave and never hassled us to buy another drink.... and the wicker chairs were very comfortable.. I guess we spend a good few hours in that restaurant in the few days we were in town.
We ended up back in Nong Khai on the return trip from Laos. We hadn't planned to. The original idea was to go up through Laos into China, but we we're enjoying Laos less and less as we traveled north and it was getting colder too. We were read reports about temperatures below zero in Yunnan province and one day we just thought, 'stuff this for a game of soldiers' and back tracked to Thailand. But that's another story... Let's talk about green curries.
A lot of recipes advise putting the lemon grass and lime leaves into the curry paste mix and giving it a wizz in a blender. I'm going to do it a little differently, and leave the lemon grass and lime leaves whole. I don't have a blender, so I find it difficult to smash those particular ingredients up by hand. Also, I sometimes use dried lemon grass and lime leaves and I get good results by soaking them in hot water while I'm doing everything else and then adding them to the mix along with the coconut milk. And, besides, it's good having pieces of lemon grass and whole lime leaves floating about in your curry. It's very exotic.
You could substitute a number of different vegetables for the ones I list below. In Thailand you find all sorts of things floating about in your green curry. For example, how about trying mushrooms, baby corn, green beans, tofu cubes, or par-boiled potato? And if you don't have all the ingredients for the curry paste don't worry: you can leave some out and your curry will still taste really good.
This pot of green curry will do about four people when you add steamed rice.
For the curry Paste:
About a cup of chopped green coriander (roots and all)
3 cloves of garlic
A piece of ginger root and/or a piece of galangal
root
3 or 4 green chillies (or more)
A few white (or black) peppercorns
A teaspoon of coriander seeds
A half teaspoon of cumin seeds
2 or 3 tablespoons of soy sauce
Juice and half the rind from a small lime
(a wild lime if you can get it)
Other ingredients:
Three or four 5-6 cm bits of lemon grass
5 or 6 lime leaves
A few sprigs of basil
Half of a medium cauliflower (or broccoli)
1 courgette
1 small aubergine
2 carrots
About 400 ml of coconut milk
Salt
If you're using dried lemon grass or lime leaves, put them in a small bowl and cover with boiling water before you do anything else; then leave them to soak while you prepare the other ingredients.
To make the curry paste, start by grinding the coriander seeds, cumin seeds and peppercorns until they're fairly powdered. Put the powder aside (in a cup or something) and then pound the fresh ingredients: garlic, ginger, galangal, lime zest, chillies and green coriander, all roughly chopped first. Smash them to a rough pulp then mix with the spice powder, soy sauce and lime juice. That's your curry paste ready.
Prepare the vegetables by separating the cauliflower into florets and chopping up the courgettes, aubergines and carrots. Cut the carrot pieces quite thin so they cook at the same time as the other veg and conversely, don't chop the aubergine and courgette too small or they'll go soggy before the cauliflower and carrot are cooked...
Heat some oil in a large deep pan and fry the paste gently for five minutes or so, stirring constantly, then add hot water (maybe about a pint and a half, or enough to half fill the pan). Add the coconut milk, the lemon grass, the lime leaves and the vegetables and maybe some more water if required (were aiming for a soupy kinda texture here). Raise the heat, and when it all starts boiling, turn the heat down again to a simmer and cover the pan. Cook until the vegetables are tender but not too soft (about five to eight minutes) adding salt to taste somewhere along the line. When the curry is ready, stir in some chopped basil and remove for the heat.
Serve in soup bowls with a small bowl or plate of steamed rice for each person.