Coconut/Cashew Curry
This stir-fry came together because the owner of the grocery told me, when I picked up some flavoured tofu, "You have to use that today."
To start, I boiled some Thai rice noodles and fried the tofu in peanut oil with six cloves garlic, a minced onion and a heaping tablespoon of black bean sauce. I let that fry until the ingredients were just browning and the tofu was slightly crisp on the outside.
To that, I added a handful of chopped carrots, three stalks of sliced celery, four pieces of sliced bok choi and a handful of snap peas, halved.
Once those were nearly tender, I poured the noodles into BATTLEWOK and mixed them thoroughly with the vegetables.
While that cooked, I toasted a handful of cashews in a frying pan, along with a teaspoon of cumin and two teaspoons peppercorns. In a bowl, I combined a can of coconut milk, the juice of one lime, a tablespoon of Cock and a tablespoon of masala.
Here, my shaolin skills were weak and I accidentally heated the frying pan a little too hot, burning my first batch of cashews. It was partly inattention, partly losing the flow of my recipe-kata. That, in turn, spiraled into my forgetting to add tamarind to the coconut milk.
However, the tamarind turned out not to be necessary to the finished product. That said, when I make this again, I'll add a dollop of tamarind paste.
When the nuts were toasted golden-brown, I added the liquid to the frying pan and brought it to a simmer. The liquid then got added to BATTLEWOK, where I stirred the boiling coconut milk into the noodles and vegetables.
The end result was a meal where every bite had a different flavour, be it subtly or radically different, but all with a base note of sour coconut and spice.