One of the things that D. requested that I make for MoFo this year was “a yellow Thai curry, not too soupy.” On a recent trip to Boston we ate at the delicious all-vegan My Thai restaurant for dinner. I had a rice noodle dish because I’m a complete sucker for rice noodles, and D. had a curry with vegetarian “chicken.” He expected the usual pile of rice and bowl of soupy curry but instead was presented with a beautiful plate of vegetables coated in just the right amount of curry sauce. The flavor was phenomenal, even better than my rice noodle dish.

Sometimes when I make Thai food I’ll resort to jarred curry paste, but I’ve decided that this is just utter laziness that produces mediocre curry. Tonight I made a yellow curry from scratch, and it didn’t even take that long. I’m already off to a good start with using my neglected cookbooks- I followed the recipe for yellow curry paste from Buddha’s Table by Chat Mingkwan.

Buddha’s Table is the only Thai cookbook I have, and I love it. For one thing, it’s entirely vegan, no fish sauce, no eggs, no converting recipes. Everything I’ve made from it so far has been excellent.

I changed the ingredients in the actual curry a bit- instead of kombucha squash I just used some butternut squash that I had sitting around. I didn’t feel like going to the market just to get taro root, so I used some yam instead. And I added a bunch of red and green chard. I also made a slaw of red cabbage, carrot, and scallions dressed with lime juice, rice vinegar, and agave nectar to go with the curry. I’ve gotten in the habit of liking to serve something raw/crunchy with most meals, particularly if it’s sort of a mushy thing like curry. The photo isn’t great, but here it is!

For dessert, I made my first attempt at sticky rice with coconut milk and mango. This is my favorite dessert to get in Thai restaurants, and I finally found the right kind of rice at Kalyustan’s in New York. (Which is well worth checking out if you like to cook- they have a bit of everything! It took a lot of willpower not to pick up all sorts of random spices and lentils and candied hibiscus flowers when I was there.)

I think I messed up the proportions a bit since I was making only 1/4 of the recipe since it looked like the full recipe would have two people eating mangoes and rice for the next three days. It ended up sort of soupy, but still tasted wonderful (you can’t go wrong with a bunch of coconut milk and sugar!)