Asian Spicy Beef Curry


Ingredients:

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 lb (250 g) beef sirloin, cut into thin slices
2 cups eggplant cubes
1 medium size unpeeled zucchini, sliced
1 fresh red pepper cut into thin strips
2 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
1 cup beef stock
1/2 cup coconut milk
1 teaspoon Thai red curry paste
1 tablespoon fresh basil, chopped
2 tablespoons fresh coriander, chopped
2 tablespoons lime juice
3 drops Tabasco sauce (or any hot pepper sauce)
Salt and ground white or black pepper to taste


Makes 4 servings.


Preparation:
  • In a wok or large frying pan heat 1 tablespoon vegetable oil. Add beef and cook for about 2 minutes. With a slotted spoon remove beef and set aside. 
  • Add remaining oil to the pan and stir in vegetables and garlic. Cook until slightly tender.
  • In a medium size bowl mix beef stock, basil, coconut milk and Tabasco sauce. Set aside.
  • Stir beef into the pan, add coconut mixture, cover and simmer, stirring occasionally for 15 to 20 minutes.
  • Stir in lime juice and coriander. Cook for 2 minutes and serve hot.

Note: In Thai cuisine, curries are meat, fish or vegetable dishes in a spiced sauce. They use local ingredients such as chili peppers, Kaffir lime leaves, lemon grass, Galangal and coconut milk, and tend to be more aromatic than Indian curries as a result. Curries are often described by colour; red curries use red chilis while green curries use green chilis. Yellow curries are more similar to Indian curries, with their use of turmeric and cumin. Yellow curries in Thailand usually don't contain potatoes except in southern style cooking, however, Thai restaurants abroad usually have them. Yellow curry is also called gaeng curry (by various spellings), of which a word-for-word translation would be "soup curry" or "curry curry". Some dishes have curry powder added.

Real Cooking
Did You Know?
Curry is a generic description used throughout European culture to describe a general variety of spiced dishes, best known in South Asian cuisines, especially Indian cuisine. Although there is no one specific attribute that marks a dish as "curry", some distinctive spices used in many curry dishes include turmeric, cumin, coriander, fenugreek, and red pepper. The word curry is an anglicised version of the Tamil word khari which is usually understood to mean "gravy" or "sauce" rather than "spices". In Urdu, an official language of Pakistan and North India, curry is usually referred to as saalan. In most South Indian cuisines, a curry is considered a side-dish, which can be eaten along with a main dish like rice or bread.

Curry's popularity in recent decades has spread outward from the Indian subcontinent to figure prominently in international cuisine. Consequently, each culture has adopted spices in its indigenous cooking to suit its own unique tastes and cultural sensibilities. Curry can therefore be called a pan-Asian or global phenomenon with immense popularity in Thai, British, and Japanese cuisines.

In British cuisine, the word "curry" is primarily used to denote a sauce-based dish flavoured with curry powder or a paste made from the powder and oils. However, the use of fresh spices such as ginger and garlic, and preparation of an initial masala from freshly ground dried spices are sometimes used.