Tangled Branches: Satiated
riveting tales of how we sustain ourselves
Monday, September 10, 2007
Thai-ish Stir Fry with Chile and Basil
This little experiment exceeded my fondest hopes - really good Thai food at home. I noticed there weren't too many ripe tomatoes in the vegetable patch, but chile (chilli?) peppers were abundant and the basil needed to be cut back. Hmmmm, chiles and basil, chiles and basil....oh yeah....pork with chiles and basil!
But I didn't have all my cookbooks with me in the country, so I'd have to improvise. Checking Chez Pim for inspiration, I found a stir-fry made with nam-prik pao, which is made with dried chiles and shallots and shrimp paste - all things I didn't have. So I made a paste consisting of 1 'Pinocchio's Nose' pepper, several (3?) 'Serrano Tampiqueno' peppers, 1 'Czechoslovakian Black' pepper, 1 'Bellingrath Gardens Hot Purple' pepper, 4 medium cloves of garlic, and the lower stems of some basil sprigs (the basil tops get added later). All the peppers were the reddest, ripest ones I could find. I chopped all this as finely as possible (not quite a paste) using an electric mini-chopper.
I sliced 3 thin-cut boneless pork chops, several New Mexico-type peppers, and part of a red onion (lengthwise) into thin strips.
Now we're ready to cook. I heated some oil in a large non-stick saute pan. When it was hot I added the chile paste and fried it for a short time (until the whole house smelled of chile and garlic). The I added the sliced peppers and onions, and 4 'Bellingrath Gardens Hot Purple' peppers (whole, but crushed with the flat side of a chef's knife). I stirred the vegetables around for a minute or so, and then added the sliced pork. Kept cooking and stirring just until all the pork pieces looked cooked. Then I added several splashes of fish sauce, tasting until I got the saltiness the way I wanted it. At the very end, I tossed in several sprigs (just the top 2 or 3 sets of leaves) of various basils - 3 or 4 sprigs of Thai basil, 2 or 3 sprigs of 'Mexican Cinnamon Spice' basil, 2 sprigs of 'Sweet Petra Dark' basil, and 3 or 4 sprigs of lemon basil.
I expected this amount of food would serve 2 with leftovers, but we ate it all! And it would have been fine without the Bellingrath Gardens Hot Purple peppers, but with them it was incendiary - just the way we always ask for it in Thai restaurants and hardly ever get. Oh yeah, I should also mention that it took a long time with the range fan, ceiling fans, and open windows before the chile fumes cleared out of the house, but we dined on the deck and it was a nice evening to have an after dinner glass of wine outdoors.
2 Comments:
Now that sounds absolutely delicious! I would have loved to try it with all those different peppers. The basil must have added a wonderful flavour. The chiles and garlic aroma would have been great too. Yummy dish there!
Kate: Glad you think it sounds good - we liked it a lot! I'm having a wonderful time with the peppers this year - almost more fun than the tomatoes.
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