Recipe: Vegetable, Tomato and Coconut Milk Curry

Last night I cooked dinner for my vegetarian friend. The initial plan had been to have a vegetable Thai green curry, however for various reasons it was decided that this wasn’t a go-er and that we should have something else instead. A quick search online led me to find a recipe for a curry sauce that only needed chopped tomatoes, an onion, garlic and curry powder. The result was so well received that I thought I would post about it here. As I was cooking for a vegetarian, this obviously doesn’t have any meat, but it would be great with beef, chicken or king prawns.

Ingredients

• 1 x carton of chopped tomatoes (I use Sainsbury’s Basics ones. To me they’re just the same as the pricier versions!)
• 1 x diced onion
• 2 x cloves of crushed garlic
• 1 x can of light coconut milk
• Spice of your choice (I used a mix of paprika, mild chilli powder and crushed chillies)
• Vegetables (I used baby corn, mange tout, peppers, courgette and aubergine)
• Coconut oil or another oil for cooking in
• Brown rice to serve with

Method

1. I can’t cook rice. Don’t know why, but I just can’t! So the first step for me is putting the boil in the bag rice into the saucepan and covering it with boiling water and turning on the heat. This then needs to boil for 28 minutes, but different varieties require different times, so check the packet!
2. In a large frying pan, heat the coconut oil. Once this has melted, add in the diced onion. Fry lightly for about 10 minutes until soft.
3. Add in the vegetables, spice and crushed garlic. Stir until the spice has pretty evenly covered the vegetables and until the onion is mixed in with the vegetables.
4. Add in the coconut milk and bring to the boil.
5. Once boiling, add in the chopped tomatoes and stir. At this point, the curry may look a light pink colour, extremely watery and perhaps not the nicest thing in the world, but keep with it!
6. Check the sauce for flavouring and add more spice if you feel necessary and salt and pepper.
7. Keep the sauce boiling and just stir occasionally. You’ll find that the coconut milk boils down so that the sauce is thicker and it also becomes red in colour (like the pic above).
8. Keep an eye on the sauce to make sure that it doesn’t boil away too much and turn down the heat so that it’s left to simmer until your rice is done.
9. Once the rice is done, turn off the heat on the curry and you’re ready to serve!

Hope you enjoy, and do let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Sammy x