Jaime Oliver's Red Thai Curry

This month I have become absolutely obsessed with a new show on the Food Network, it is Jaime Oliver's Meals in Minutes. Throughout the years I have watched Jaime move from one show to the next, trying to inspire regular people to stop eating pre-packaged foods/take-out and opt for a healthy homemade alternative. Despite his efforts, convincing the regular joe to cook for 2 hours to put dinner on the table was not going to happen, at least not every night. His new show however promises to put a full-course tasty AND healthy meal on the table in 30 minutes. Watching him create mouthwatering dishes from appetizer to dessert inspired me to put one of his recipes to the test. Being a huge fan of Thai curries I was pumped to try his Red Thai Curry.


Despite being a huge fan of Thai cuisine I most definitely did not have the majority of the ingredients sitting in my pantry. Therefore I headed over to the local Asian grocery store to pick up ingredients such as kaffir lime leaves and lemon grass. All in all everything on the ingredient list cost about $30, which included 3 bags of shrimps :)  With all my ingredients in hand, I took Jamie's advice and laid everything out I was going to need. I plugged in the food processor, preheated the oven and had my pans at the ready. I looked at the clock and began cooking. I will admit I cheated. I not only used a rice cooker to make my fluffy rice but I also had no intention of making the papaya platter as I do not like papaya.  I also could not be bothered to make the cucumber salad. So did I think that I was going to have everything done in 30 minutes, absolutely.

I had the rice washed and cooking in 2 minutes and felt quite confident that I would be enjoying my Thai curry shortly.  I chucked the coriander, tomato paste, ginger, red pepper ( I forgot to purchase the roasted red peppers in oil), garlic, lime leaves and chili in the food processor. Jaime encourages viewers to taste the chili to determine the intensity of heat. Thank goodness I tried it. My one inch chili packed a punch, therefore I decided one was more than enough. Having never worked with lemon grass I was a little taken aback of its woody-bamboo like texture, but threw it in away.


I locked the food-processor lid in place and turned it on. Unfortunately for me, my food processor did not produce the miracle paste that Jamie's food processor produced.  Instead it made a horrible sound and the smell of metal began emanating from the machine. I tried to see what the problem was and wasted 20 mins trying to get it to blitz. I then got the bright idea to use my hand-held blender....another disaster. Then, realizing that it was too late to chop everything up manually as they were covered in each other's juices, I took out my cheese and meat grinder and thought that would do the trick. It grated the ginger and then everything else got stuck. So I started manually chopping. After making what looked more like a salsa than a paste, I added the olive oil, sesame oil and soy sauce. I  tried the concoction and was pleasantly surprised with how the flavours popped in my mouth.

After the food processor and the blender

I started by adding some of the paste to the raw shrimp and popped them in the oven, then placed the remainder of the paste in a pot and followed Jaime's instructions. Everything after the paste ordeal was coming together in a matter of minutes.  I pulled the shrimps out of the oven and got a bowl of rice and added the curry and shrimps to it. It was delicious. Granted the sauce was a little thinner than my personal preference but the flavour was definitely there. I will be making this recipe again and next time I either chop the paste manually the first time around or I get a new food processor.

Stress level: 3/5 (The food processor issue really threw me for a loop but after that was resolved, it was smooth sailing)

Tastiness: 3.5/5 (It was still lacking compared to the Thai Lamb Curry at the Bangkok Spoon)

Cooking Time: 45 mins (Granted without machine issues it could have been accomplished in 15-20 mins)

Overall rating: 4/5 (Definitely worth repeating)