Thai Green Curry Paste

Here's something tasty and satisfying for you to make over this Easter weekend. You can use it in this recipe and I've just realised I haven't posted my standard green curry recipe yet so I'll do that for next week and link it here.

So, curry pastes. They're so much easier to buy, right? Wrong. If you have a food processor (I have this mini Cuisinart one, that's great and under £25, (or it was when I got one for me and then one for my mum) it's currently £35 but still worth it, then it's so easy. All you have to do is buy the ingredients and shove them in the food processor before pressing the button with one hand and trying to cover your ears with the other! It's a noisy beast but small and useful and relatively inexpensive. I use mine for pesto and curry pastes mainly, and blitzing breadcrumbs. It is more expensive to make homemade curry pastes but, as with most things, tastes so much better. For the first time, I could see why it was called a green curry (and it wasn't because food dye had been added!).

All of the ingredients!

Pesto Take Two

As some of you may remember, I tried and failed to make pesto back in September. Last week I came across another pesto recipe and decided to try it so that I could make pesto and mozzarella tarts. In case it also failed, I bought a jar of ready made sauce! Well, I'm happy to report that this recipe (I think it was from delicious.) works perfectly, though I have changed the amount of parmesan as it was slightly overpowering. This does mean that the ingredients are now terribly easy to remember as they're all the same quantities or by eye.

You'll ideally use a a mini food processor for this but If you were feeling up to it a pestle and mortar should work too, just don't try to overload it. I promise that if you make this you won't regret it, or go back to jars as it only takes the amount of time the 10 minute pasta takes to cook.