Thai Red Curry with Chicken & Butternut Squash

I know it's lazy but when I get home from work I can never be bothered to make my own curry paste. In place of the real deal, I tend to use a good quality paste and spruce it up with some extras, you'll hardly notice the difference. To save the pennies, I only used two chicken breasts and bulked the recipe out with butternut squash. It's still super tasty, just cheaper and healthier! 

Serves 4
2 free range chicken breasts, cut into large chunks
Butternut squash, deseeded and cut into 2cm chunks
White onion, chopped
Red pepper, chopped
3 garlic cloves, grated
2cm piece of ginger, grated
Mixed pack of mange tout & mini sweetcorn
400ml can reduced fat coconut milk
100g jar red curry paste (ideally Bart's)
Juice of 1 lime
1 tbsp fish sauce
Rice to serve

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Put the butternut squash chunks into a roasting tin, drizzle with oil and pop in the oven for 45 minutes
2. Meanwhile, heat a large pan with a tablespoon of oil on a medium heat. Add the chopped onion and red pepper to the pan, gently fry for 10 minutes. Next add the mange tout, sweetcorn, garlic and ginger, allow to soften for a few minutes
3. Now add the Thai curry paste, reduced fat coconut milk, fish sauce, lime juice and chicken. Bring to a light simmer and cook for 20 minutes, allowing the chicken to poach in the sauce. Add the roasted butternut squash for the final 5 minutes, serve with jasmine rice

Thai Green Curry with Prawns

I love Thai food, but I’ve never been particularly successful at recreating it at home. Unless you’re lucky enough to have a good Asian supermarket close by, I find it’s quite difficult to get hold of the ingredients for the paste. As you can see from this recipe on the Guardian’s excellent ‘How to make the perfect…’ blog, the majority of the ingredients aren’t the kind of thing you can pick up from the local supermarket. As I have to make do with ingredients from Sainsbury’s and I’m quite lazy when it comes to midweek meals, I decided to make do with a ready-made curry paste. The paste has the basic flavours needed for the curry, by adding extra lime, fish sauce, lemongrass etc. it gave the sauce the extra zing the paste alone was missing. The end result was pretty good, and considerably cheaper than buying all the ingredients for the paste, the remainder of which would inevitably have ended up rotting in my fridge.

Serves 4:

4 tbsp green Thai curry paste

1 lemongrass stalk

1 tbsp fish sauce

1 tsp light muscovado sugar

Juice 1 lime

Tin coconut milk

1 green chilli

3 cloves garlic, grated

2cm piece ginger, grated

1 onion, finely chopped

1 red pepper, chopped

1 courgette, chopped

1 small butternut squash

100g mange tout

Handful basil leaves

Method:

1. Cut the squash into 1cm chunks, toss in olive oil and roast for 45 minutes until soft.
2. Fry the onion, garlic & ginger for 5 minutes until soft. Add the chilli, pepper and courgette and fry gently for a further 5 minutes.
3. Add the curry paste, fish sauce, sugar, lime juice, lemongrass and coconut milk. Bring the sauce to a light simmer, add the mange tout and roasted butternut squash and keep on a low heat for 20 minutes. If the sauce gets too thick add a little vegetable stock to loosen it.
4. To serve, remove the lemongrass and top with basil leaves and spring onion. If you’d like to add some protein, either add some raw king parwns for the final 5 minutes or add chicken breast chunks for the final 15 minutes and allow them to poach in the sauce.

Curry cooking:

Ready to eat!