Again, Weight Watchers attempts to label a watered-down diet recipe made with ingredients that you can easily find in normal grocery store as being somehow authentically ethnic (I had doubts about the coconut milk, but success! It was harder to find orzo in our local grocery than it was to find coconut milk. Weird.)
I had a bit of a stumbling block with this recipe as it called for vegetable broth. I'm a "reluctant omnivore", meaning I wouldn't mind being vegetarian, but it's hard to do when you're attempting to cook for an entire family and diet and not break said family's bank at the store. So at this point I would normally be quite willing to throw in some chicken broth and call it a day. But we didn't have any, and I'd hit my weekly limit for how many times I was willing to go to the grocery store for some random necessary item. The more I thought about it, the more I was unwilling to potentially alter the taste of the dish. And then I realized that we had all manner of miscellaneous vegetables with no immediate plans. How hard could vegetable broth really be? Not hard at all, I learned.
Collect vegetables. Chop.
Put in pot. Throw in a little olive oil, parsley, saute up the onions and such (we had a couple of leeks that weren't getting used for anything else, so that was perfect). Let it boil for an hour.
Strain. The directions I had said something about cheesecloth, but it wasn't necessary, especially with this smaller strainer that we had.
I grabbed the first handy thing, which happened to be the crock pot, and strained it into that. I let it cool off, and then put it in tupperware containers and froze everything I didn't immediately need. The only thing I wish I could have done differently is the freezing process - I had read somewhere that it's really handy to freeze it into ice cube trays, and then a few can be tossed into anything you need. Sadly/Fortunately, we have an ice maker, so that was a no-go.
So that was Part 1/Day 1 of this recipe. Since that took a long time, the actual recipe was going to need to wait until the next day.
First a few notes on how the recipe turned out. Initially I wasn't enjoying it. I think I expected it to look and taste exactly like a yellow curry soup from a Thai restaurant, since the ingredients seemed pretty much congruent. It doesn't taste like that, but after a bit of an adjustment (a bit more salt and pretty much tripling the amount of curry, plus adding a dash to every bowl I've heated up from the leftovers), it is very tasty in its own way. Apparently the recipe authors totally doubt my commitment to Sparkle Motion. I mean curry.
The ingredients gather together, awaiting their boiled fate. In the back, you may notice cilantro. Cut to 5 years from now, where I enter a rehab with other foodies addicted to fresh herbs. Notice the pretty-labeled coconut milk that I found in our international aisle. The recipe technically called for cremini mushrooms, so I thought I was missing out on something by substituting baby bellas. Turns out that creminis are pretty typical-looking mushrooms, somewhere in between a portobella and button. Here I thought I was being deprived because I can never use the mushrooms they ask for, and it's true that we don't have shitakes or anything, but really it's just a fancy name for the normal fare.
Like many awesome recipes, it starts with onion and garlic on the bottom of the pan. I think the ginger was in there, too. Fresh ginger probably isn't necessary, but it's nice sometimes.
Yeah, that pot sees a lot of action. That one and its pot-mates are supremely good at even cooking and non-stickage. After that it's just a matter of throwing in the chopped ingredients and broth, saving the coconut milk for post-simmer incorporation.
And so on, and so forth. This is why I love soups. Get everything chopped up and it's basically a matter of 1+1=delicious.
Serve with a delicious beverage that is of a color not found in nature (Crystal Light Strawberry Tangerine). Or you know, water. If you want to be boring like that. Like I said, I ended up just scooping a bunch more curry in there to make it more flavorful.
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