You know that feeling when you look in the back of your closet and find a forgotten favorite shirt that fell off a hanger and has been buried in a dark corner for several months? A) How could I have forgotten that beloved shirt? And B) Woo! It's like Christmas in May and I'm never taking this shirt off, not even to shower. Also C) It totally fits me better now that I've got these awesome white pants that match it. That feeling. That's the one that I got with this recipe. To be honest, I think much has to do with the recipe improvements I made on the second go around (namely crab --> tofu). Plus, if you look at those pictures of the pile of slop from the prior version (see below the jump), it's pretty clear why we shoved it in the back of the recipe box and forgot about it for over two years. And boy am I glad we dug into the archives for this vegetable & tofu Thai curry.

Here's what changed: This recipe used to have crab in the title - it was meant to be the star of the dish in my first iteration, but as you'll see from my description below, it got lost in the curry. This time around, I was also much too lazy to go through the process of cooking and cracking a whole crab again; patience is not one of my strong suits. I'm not the person you hand a tangled necklace chain to; It'll be a disaster where I end up looking like a cat with ball of string. Only no one's having fun. This time around I tossed in some of the extra firm Hodo Soy tofu I used in my BBQ pineapple tofu skewers. The tofu simultaneously soaked up the curry's strong flavors, while still letting it's own nuttiness shine through.

The other change I made was swapping in brown sugar for palm sugar, which only happened because our palm sugar had gone bad and I didn't feel like buying more of something we rarely used; the results were just as delightful. I also added broccoli and mushrooms because: yum! My dad got served the leftovers when he came for lunch the next day and, without knowing it had tofu,  declared it delicious - a HUGE hurdle for him.

A week later, I hauled my rice cooker over to our old neighborhood to make the curry with our German friends. Only we used chicken instead because Cordula worried tofu would be hard to sell to the kids. Oh, kids, you're missing out! There's deep feeling of community I get from cooking with friends in their kitchen. They had a Russian friend visiting from Germany, and I felt a heightened need to impress her. Cordula and her friend were in charge of taking the recipe shopping list along with them to the market in search of each ingredient. Their German roots are only relevant here because I received several S.O.S. shopping texts, "what are asparagus spears??" We had a good laugh about that one, then a victory text with a picture of all the loot. 

This Thai curry is layered - sweet, salty, spicy, with stand-out notes from the asparagus and tofu. I spooned it over forbidden rice because it's our new favorite and is filled with tons of antioxidants. Feel free to use your favorite rice instead! Also, what's nice about this dish is that you can sub in whatever vegetables you want. Don't like mushrooms? No problem. Have a red bell pepper that's slowly shriveling and ready to be cooked? The more the merrier! We'll have a vegetable party in this wok.

This Thai curry is inspired by Thai Food and Travel, who taught a Thai cooking class and passed on the basic principles of Thai curry to my cousin, who then shared what he learned with me, along with a bundle of kaffir lime leaves he grew. The basic principle of Thai curry, he said, is that there's harmony between spicy, sweet, and salty flavors, mostly done "to taste."

My life motto is all about growing and learning, so in that spirit here’s a before and after shot from the original post in February 2012 to today’s recipe rewind two years later. We shot the original with a point-and-shoot, using a make-shift light diffuser. We reshot this recipe with a Canon 5d Mark II with a 50mm f/1.4 lens. This is not just an issue of "oh, that's a crappy photo," but this is a lesson in food styling to make food look yummy.  I don't think it's even a question which one looks more appetizing (hint: it's not the one that looks like velveeta).

                       February 2012                                                May 2014